A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  Troom’s first gambit was to stock his lunch provisions in the dovecot kitchen, but this only guaranteed that, finding the downstairs fridge absent of sandwich makings, the entire crew would tromp up his stairs, and Truman would wake to jar lid clattering and the intricate details of Meredith College’s lightboards in the

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  middle of the night. They’d figured him out fast: Truman ate the same lunch every day and would therefore always have ham. By the time Truman remembered that he’d installed the means of locking them out ten years earlier, Mordecai or one of his lackeys had drawn my mother’s spare from the dovecot lock and pocketed the key.

  Therefore Truman’s very last resort was to address the issue of sandwich makings to his brother directly.

  ‘Mordecai,’ Truman raised early that evening (breakfast), backed up against a counter and trying furiously to sound by-the-by. ‘Do you, um, include lunch as part of your pay?’

  Mordecai had fumbled to the freezer and poured himself a wake-me-up of aquavit. ‘It’s not in their contracts, if that’s what you mean. But those boys work fucking hard and I figure they deserve a fucking sandwich. Gotta problem?’ Mordecai was not paying much attention.

  Truman retreated out of his brother’s path as Mordecai nosed into the breadbox and scouted the last of another loaf of Branola. ‘It’s just, the ingredients, you know,’ said Truman faintly, ‘are adding up.’

  Mordecai looked up with an expression of unutterable disdain. He hauled out his fat wallet, bulging with receipts and high denominations, and frisbeed his brother a hundred dollar bill. ‘Happy?’

  It fell to the floor at about the place where Truman’s spare key would have dropped at my mother’s feet, only this time it was Truman who stooped and mumbled thanks, his face burning.

  I shook my head, marvelling. Though a hundred bucks might seem excessive for a little ham and mustard, after two solid weeks of pillage a C-note was a drop in the bucket. Still, Mordecai’s contempt, coupled with the appearance of overpayment, ensured that Truman would never again ask Mordecai for lunch money as long as he lived. Was this calculated? I was beginning to concur with NC State: my older brother was a genius.

  One of the horrid things about families is that they are largely about the past, but one of the pleasant things about the past is that it reprieves you from the future. Or seems to, though attended to or not the future does come romping along of its own accord. I could spend my time grieving for my sculptures or grieving for

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  my parents, but grief as an activity doesn’t fill the day. We’d finished shoving trinkets into boxes. With little to do with myself I had, for the maw between Christmas and New Year’s, conceded to type up invoices for Mordecai, run his post and print out his orders. I was only allowed to work on the laptop and Bubblejet upstairs; he would not let me near his Compaq Prolinea and Design Jet plotter in the sitting room. That these hallowed toys, along with the state-of-the-art Autocad software, were worth $30,000 I probably heard at least once a day.

  Even those five days in his employ had been illuminating. He’d left me far too much to my own devices; mitching would have been a doddle. I’m pretty dogged in the docking hours department, but his other henchmen, for all their ‘fucking hard work’, were doubtless taking advantage of similar independence. My younger brother was not the only patsy. When Mordecai explained his Lotus software, he went through the keystrokes much too fast and assumed I knew more than I did; while I was flattered he gave me so much credit, I was also relieved to find a manual among the catalogues when he was gone or I’d have been lost.

  I thought I’d managed pretty well, considering Mordecai’s explana-tions were worse than none, but then I made a mistake. I wiped out a file. He yelled at me—he’d been drinking, if that bears mention that any more—and called me a ‘ditzy broad’, and a ‘brain-dead bimbo’. I said, well you’re the one who didn’t keep a bloody hard copy back-up and screw this, I quit. Typical fucking girl, said Mordecai, can’t take a little flak, one sharp word and it’s I quit—what a fucking baby. All of Mordecai’s wives had been employed by Decibelle at one time or another, and fired at one time or another, or that’s what Mordecai said but no doubt they walked out, as they also walked out of his life. On his payroll I was in perilously familiar territory, his and mine.

  Licking Mordecai’s envelopes I’d felt so like my meek mother and her lowly tending to the great man’s needs, that a few days into January I got a job at a framing shop in Crabtree Valley. It was shit work that paid less per hour than Mordecai did, and pretty depressing. I was pained to see people spend all that money to giltedge wide-eyed kittycats, under-exposed sunsets, and weeping Christs on velvet, but at least Frames got me out of the house.

  Alas, nine-to-five was the least strenuous segment of the day—when Decibelle slept, Truman burrowed in philosophy texts, and 171

  Averil was at work. It wasn’t as if I, like Truman, couldn’t bear it when Mordecai awoke, rankled by his presence in our house. No, I liked having my older brother home at last, and I was happy to make him syrupy black coffee and perch on the outside rail of the carriage house as sawdust billowed out the door and swirled in the floodlights. Mordecai would chat to me about ‘strange attractors’, monologues that didn’t require much more than uh-huh and my mind could graze.

  What I could not bear was being stretched on a rack between the first and third floors. The longer I spent on the porch, the more vigorously I would later have to thaw Truman’s icy demeanour in the dovecot af-terwards. The longer I spent in the dovecot, the more snippy remarks I would be obliged to make about Truman the next time I perched on Mordecai’s rail. The whole cycle of conspiracy, abandonment and placation made me feel despicable. I was beginning to wonder if rather than be the lucky one in the triangle, the privileged middle member whose attentions were so coveted, I was instead the victim and pawn.

  Worse still, they both liked to ruminate about what life would be like

  ‘after partition’, when each assumed he would be snugly ensconced with his sister for life.

  Therefore, having squandered the peaceable hours of our household’s day conferring with old ladies about which frame best picked up the lovely fleck of green in their pooches’ eyes, at the beginning of my second week of work I returned home at six for the agonizing half-hour when both brothers were in the same kitchen. I burst in acting falsely effervescent—just like my mother—telling stories to neither in particular while they kept their backs to each other. Truman was silently preparing chicken thighs while Mordecai groped half-blind and just out of bed to the freezer for aquavit. Fortified, Mordecai mounded so much coffee into a filter that there was no room in the cone for hot water. I assumed Truman was making that horrible splatting sound by hurling skin in the sink because he’d bought that pound of French Roast two days ago and it was already shot.

  Then I found the Raleigh Times on the table, open to the real estate section with an advert circled in red marker:

  SALE AT AUCTION—Judicial partition. Grand Reconstruction mansion at 309 Blount Street, Oakwood, Raleigh. Three 172

  storeys; seven bedrooms, plus separate apartment. Assessed valuation $410,000; minimum bid $250,000. Bids taken February 5,1993, 9 a.m., Jaycees Center, Room 112. To view, contact owners at (919) 828-5292.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I muttered.

  ‘We got a couple of calls today,’ said Truman, ‘from our new little friends.’

  His tone was smouldering. He was yanking skin off the chicken thighs like Crazy Horse scalping Custer’s soldiers.

  ‘What did you tell them?’ I asked.

  ‘To go stuff themselves,’ said Truman.

  ‘You didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘All right, I didn’t. But I didn’t suck up to them and act all grateful that somebody was willing to buy my own house from under my feet.

  I told them the place was a wreck—’ He cut his eyes towards Mordecai, whose few tablespoons of hot water had indeed failed to trickle
through the filter. Mordecai poured in more water anyway; the cone tipped off the thermos and spewed its moist grounds like diarrhoea all over the floor.

  ‘—Which it is,’ Truman finished.

  Mordecai glanced at his brother and the coffee sludge with equal boredom, settled for one more shot of aquavit, and walked out.

  ‘One of the callers,’ Truman grumbled, his eyes narrowing after his brother, ‘was Japanese.’

  ‘So?’ I asked from the floor. The coffee muck rapidly demoted our new sponge from special to perfectly good.

  ‘First they’re buying Rockefeller Center, now my house. Fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor’s barely over, and for all their gosh-we’re-sorry they’ve figured out a much sneakier way of taking over this country. Sell us Nissans and use the profits to buy this place up. You see them in Oakwood in droves, you know. Taking those Capital City Trail tours of all the old houses, clicking away? They love this neighbourhood. Sushi’s old hat. They want buffalo wings and hush puppies.

  They wear Caterpillar Tractor caps and say “ya’ll” and titter behind their hands. I’ve heard them. They collect out on Blount Street and ogle our house and sometimes they knock and want to look around, as if we’re some sort of state museum, and now, I suppose, I’ve got to let them inside.’

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  ‘In that the Japanese are also known as inveterate racists,’ I said sharply, squeezing out the sponge, ‘I guess they’d fit into this neighbourhood just fine.’

  My father would turn in his grave. If his public exhortations to tolerance held little sway with his children, his private intolerance of any infringement on his convenience had passed to the next generation perfectly intact.

  I had dinner with Truman and Averil, though we couldn’t hear one another over the din from the back porch, which Mordecai was using for an impromptu sawhorse. We’d only discovered that his rotary saw had completely severed two floorboards the week before when Truman’s foot crashed through to the ground. Mordecai had been in residence not three weeks, and he’d already clawed a four-foot scrape down the mahogany panelling of the foyer while hand trucking the Compaq Prolinea to the sitting room, put out one of the carriage house windows when angling a two-by-six on to his table saw, and shattered a balustrade in a fall when staggering up to bed. It was hard to resist the notion that Mordecai wanted possession of his inheritance largely to be able to destroy it.

  While Averil cleaned the kitchen, I joined Truman for tea (there was no more coffee) in the dovecot, where they barricaded themselves against Mordecai most evenings as they once had against my mother.

  I’d have expected the usual impotent rage in response to the advert.

  Instead I found Truman sobered, philosophical.

  ‘Something isn’t adding up, Corlis,’ he said, staring into his tea as if trying to read the leaves. ‘Mordecai wants his money, right? But we made him an offer and he turned it down. He didn’t try to get us to go higher, he took us right to court. I understand he likes to throw his weight around, but that suit was a lot of bother. Then he moves in here.

  With the house going on the market. He lugged in all that heavy equipment which next month he’ll have to drag out again. And with the minimum bid set at two-fifty, he runs the risk of the house going for less than the appraisal; if those Japanese are tightwads, you and I may be able to scarf up our own house at a bargain. Nothing he’s done seems logical to me. He’s supposed to be so smart. What’s going on?

  Or has he really taken too many drugs?’

  I knew I should play dumb, but couldn’t stop myself. ‘Have 174

  you ever thought that Mordecai might feel shut out of our family? A little cheated? He left here at fourteen—he seemed so towering to us then, but he was just a kid. And on the rare times he visited, he had to play the big man. Mordecai barely had a childhood, barely had a family.

  So he concocts an excuse to come back home.’

  ‘What, he’s trying at long last to get close to his brother? He would say more to a dog.’

  I thought I would burst. I was dying to tell Truman that Mordecai wanted the house for himself, if only so we could brood over why. ‘He wants something. I doubt he’s quite sure what it is or how to get it.

  Maybe that’s why his moving in seems so irrational.’

  ‘It’s not so confusing, what he wants,’ Truman countered. ‘He wants you.’

  I pretended to take a sip from my tea, but it was gone. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Think I haven’t noticed, how he asks you out to dinner and gets you to fix him a sandwich and print his invoices? He wants you to hang out by the carriage house, my workshop, and treats you to his perpetual yammer about chaos theory—’

  ‘He’s separated from his wife, don’t you think he gets lonely?’

  ‘CORRIE LOU!’ bellowed up the stairs.

  I stood up.

  ‘You always scurry when he calls.’

  ‘Don’t I scurry when you call?’

  ‘I don’t call.’

  Funnily enough, Truman was right. He never summoned me, as he hadn’t begged for my companionship when he was four. He presented himself, to be played with, or not. His only solicitation had been to look forlorn.

  ‘I’ll go see what he wants,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve made an appointment with a banker,’ Truman said behind me,

  ‘to finance a mortgage. Next Tuesday, the nineteenth, at three. Make arrangements to take time off work, Corlis. The auction’s just over three weeks away. Be there.’

  For once: a summons.

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  13

  My presence had been commanded because one of Mordecai’s braids had come unclipped, and waist-long hair was flying free—a hazard around machinery. Mordecai asked while I was at it would I reweave all three pigtails; this used to be Dix’s job, and he didn’t know how to do that nifty plaiting across the scalp. I sat him down in the kitchen and untwisted his hair, combing it out until the crimps lifted into a thick messianic ripple. I’d rarely seen Mordecai with his hair down, and I took longer than I needed teasing out snarls. The cascade was so wild and lustrous unbound, suggesting there was something in Mordecai himself that was too tightly wrapped and yearned for open air.

  If Mordecai had been courting my company of late, he didn’t know what to do with it when he got it. He was more in his element holding forth to groups. Maybe he fought with his wives because screaming and smashing furniture was the only mode he had mastered one-to-one. As I combed down his back, he reached for the News and Observer, and lit on Bush’s declaration that American forces would definitely be out of Somalia by March. ‘Man, this reads like a Christmas wish list!

  Somebody should tell Georgie it’s January…’

  Mordecai’s theatrical ridicule would have passed for conversation with a larger audience, but came off as nervous prattle with his sister.

  The majority of his discourse consisted of either harangues, or set-pieces that might have been lifted wholesale from a Britannica entry; Mordecai talked a lot and communicated almost nothing. He must have felt desolate, trapped in an echo chamber where he could only hear his own voice, a chorus that surely rang hollow to Mordecai himself. You’d think it inevitable such a man would begin to conclude that talking didn’t work.

  He never mentioned his marriage. He didn’t discuss how he 176

  felt about his parents’ deaths. Though I’d heard from Big Dave that Decibelle’s balance sheet was increasingly bloody, Mordecai never said thing-one about his finances either. As he’d tell my parents about his imminent successes and never allude to a single failure, he allowed himself two emotions in public view: pride and disdain.

  Gathering the first three strands of the left braid, I was staggered at how hard it was to ask a simple personal question. ‘Mordecai—do you miss your wife?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said gruffly. ‘What do you think I am?’

  Ah. So we were to dismiss his finer feelings as self-evident, in the interests of dis
cussing the less obvious foibles of American foreign policy.

  ‘And what about Mother and Father?’ I experimented. ‘Do you miss them as well? Or not?’

  That got him. This answer, for Mordecai, was not beyond dispute.

  As I finished weaving the scalp and proceeded to the main braid. He said nothing.

  ‘If I died,’ he asked at last, ‘do you think they would have missed me?’

  Typically, he would boomerang the question to himself. ‘For twenty-five years, you made yourself so scarce that you may as well have been dead. In a way, they wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.’

  ‘You mean no.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I insisted. ‘I think they’d have both been awfully upset. But I also think,’ I added, since there was no use in glossing over, ‘that, well, especially Father would have been surprised at that. At his sense of loss. Shocked, even.’ I fixed the end with an alligator clip. ‘But you didn’t answer my question. Do you miss them?’

  He said with a sigh, ‘Shit, I did all my missing while they were alive.’

  He turned his head, seeking my eyes, and I lost the threads of his right braid and would have to start again. ‘It wasn’t easy, fending for myself at fourteen, you know that? And they disowned me.’

  ‘Oh, they did not—’

  ‘ They disowned me.’

  In the wake of his vehemence, I physically stepped back.

  ‘They were ashamed of me,’ he went on bitterly. ‘I didn’t have a 177

  law degree from Harvard. I’m the grubbing capitalist, right? Well, Father passing judgements from on high was the one with his head in the ozone. Money makes this country tick. Without people like me the great state of North Carolina wouldn’t have had the tax base to pay him to flaunt his ideals in his big black robe—’