A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  I was losing him. I tugged sharply on a strand to reign him in.

  ‘Say you miss them,’ I whispered in his ear. ‘Say you remember Father going bananas when his typewriter ribbon jammed, banging around his study shouting “I’ll be swiggered!” and that makes you smile. And Mother could sing, couldn’t she? She had a gorgeous voice—’

  He laughed a little, and for once it was not a snicker. ‘She had a gorgeous body, fuck the voice.’

  ‘Yes. She was beautiful. She sang you to sleep—“Day is Done” or

  “Grandfather’s Clock” and though you were nodding off you would beg her, beg her for another. And she made wonderful pie.’

  ‘All right, all right!’ He raised his hands in surrender. ‘I do, I—’

  When Truman and Averil walked in at that moment I could have kicked them.

  Then, it was eleven o’clock, and time for grapefruit, one of the key elements in Truman’s anti-constipation programme. Mordecai shied at my hand, complaining the right braid was too tight, would I do it again.

  Before I resumed, he launched to the pantry and returned to the table with a bottle of Lindemann’s shiraz. Truman’s eyes followed the wine while he stooped at the open refrigerator, whose light glinted in his pupils with a cold blue tint.

  ‘Like I said, Core,’ Mordecai boistered, cutting the lead foil with his Swiss Army knife. ‘There’s no fucking way the US gets out of that mudhole in six weeks. It’s a cinch to step in dogshit, a lot harder to get it off your shoe.’

  Frankly, I was a little mystified how Mordecai was aware we’d invaded Somalia. I had never seen him actually read a newspaper, merely declaim over it. He tuned the TV to Oprah rather than to MacNeil-Lehrer. The only texts I’d seen him devour since he moved in were a Zap comic and the 1993 Blaupunkt catalogue. For all his references to Kafka and Nietzsche, I’d never seen him open a book, and I suspected his familiarity with these writers was derived from Junior High, when he would carry Thus Spake

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  Zarathustra through the halls of Leroy Martin to impress his teachers.

  Yet since his information did not entirely date back to the Johnson ad-ministration, he must have read something some time—he was like one of those obese people you never see eat. I pictured him holed up in a closet with a torch over The Economist, because if Mordecai imbibed information he didn’t want to be caught at it, much as my mother claimed he would never allow himself to be seen sleeping in his crib, but would pull himself up on the rails wide-eyed and weaving as soon as the nursery door cracked open.

  Popping the cork for emphasis, Mordecai was paralleling Somalia with Vietnam. If the comparison was none too novel, it did provide another pretext for reminding Truman that he was from a less tested, if not trivial generation. My mother had been determined to blame her first-born’s ‘disturbance’ on the Vietnam War, but I was never persuaded. True, Mordecai’s draft number was in the early twenties, but by the time he turned eighteen it was mid-’72 and the war was winding down. That he was never forced to flee romantically to Canada seemed the source of both his relief and his regret. In my view, the stress in Mordecai’s adolescence wasn’t the turmoil of the Sixties so much as the anxiety of nearly missing out on them. Mordecai had played the geeky egghead mascot for the hip Chapel Hill crowd, popping tabs of acid in the back of vans and extemporizing on the theory of relativity in garrulous detail that before you’re old enough to drive is rather sweet. If this is not too great a leap, I believe his wait-for-me experience at fifteen explained why I was still braiding his waist-long hair. There’s nothing like lingering on the fringe of a movement to make an enthusiast for life. It’s the last-minute add-on at the end of a guest list who is sure to show up at a party first and leave last, as if he senses how close he came to not being invited at all. Most of the slightly older ex-hippies I knew had flattops and horn-rims and MBAs. They voted Republican, parroted Milton Friedman, and sat transfixed by CNN all through the Gulf War, cheering and raising beers when Patriots intercepted Scuds as if they were watching the Brooklyn Bridge Fourth of July fireworks.

  ‘Mark my words,’ Mordecai proclaimed, gulping half a glass of shiraz in a swallow. ‘Those marines will end up whacking twelve-year-olds in technicals and look like child-killers.’

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  He drained his glass. That was our last bottle.

  ‘The United States had no choice,’ said Truman, clawing at his grapefruit peel while eyeing the demise of our wine. ‘Popular support for intervention—’

  ‘Was trumped up by a load of damp-eyed journalists hungry for another we-gotta-do-something poor-dumb-nigger story.’

  Another glass; that bottle cost nine dollars.

  ‘But those poor people were starving!’ peeped Averil.

  Mordecai didn’t turn his head.

  Truman’s hands were dripping with grapefruit juice. ‘The operation has succeeded in getting food to—’

  ‘Pull out and the bastards will be right back at it,’ Mordecai overrode.

  ‘Didn’t those bloodthirsty funks bring the famine on themselves? There wasn’t a drought or a plague of locusts, was there? They were just so busy mowing each other down with AKs that nobody bothered to plant crops. Why garden when you can act in your very own spaghetti western?’

  ‘The people who were starving,’ Truman submitted doggedly, ‘weren’t necessarily the people who deserved—’

  ‘Somalis,’ Mordecai cut him off, ‘are assholes. They all—deserve—to die!’

  The Sweeney Todd refrain was off-key, but I laughed. Truman shot me a look as if I were an effigy of Guy Fawkes he personally planned to torch. Nodding at the depleted shiraz, he muttered, ‘You’d think that Mordecai of all people would support the doctrine of overwhelming force.’

  Now that Truman had finished peeling his grapefruit and removed every trace of membrane, Mordecai polished off several segments. The muscles in Truman’s jaw began to pop.

  ‘It’s a question of national sovereignty,’ said Truman, leaning back from his plate as if no longer interested in his citrus once Mordecai had touched it. ‘Do you let societies do whatever they like to their own people as long as it’s within national boundaries? Or when human rights are being sufficiently violated do you have a moral imperative to intrude? In some ways it’s analogous to cases of domestic violence.’

  With Truman doing isometrics with his grapefruit peel until my eyes were stinging from its spray, mention of domestic violence made me edgy. But Mordecai was oblivious to the set of Truman’s jaw, and slurped down his second glass of vino.

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  ‘Intervention has diddly to do with national sovereignty, True, it has to do with money like everything has to do with money. Cold War’s over, kid, and the United States can’t afford to be every barefoot country’s mom. At the very least you’ve gotta do the job right, so if we go into Somalia we’re obliged to take over the whole shebang and cobble together a new government. That takes years and moolah and who wants that shit-hole for the fifty-first state? Fine, human rights, all very worthy, but justice is expensive, and we’ve got our own problems.

  Fucking downtown Raleigh is a shambles, Belks closing, jigaboos shooting scag on every corner? I say, let Somalia rot in its own stinking pit. Let them shoot each other until there’s not a Somali left standing and then the problem takes care of itself and we can fund urban transit and health care in the U. S. of fucking A.’

  Yet another champion of the downtrodden for whom my father could take credit.

  ‘What do you think of intervention in Somalia?’ Truman charged me as I combed out Mordecai’s unwoven middle hair.

  Truman didn’t give a toss what I thought about Somalia. He wanted to know whose side I was on and why I was braiding that wanker’s hair. I walked a diplomatic middle line: ‘Bush’s last bid for nobility as a lame duck. Or maybe he’s hoping to hand Clinton a headache, a little welcome-to-the-White-House present, like a whoopie cushion.’

  Truman wouldn’t let me g
et away with it. ‘That was a political analysis. What about a moral one? Would you go in to stop the famine, Corlis? Or not?’

  ‘Me, personally? Of course not. We’ve had this discussion, Truman—I’m not benevolent.’

  ‘ Father would have approved of intervention,’ said Truman slyly.

  ‘Maybe after a lot of backwards-and-forwardsing, but he wouldn’t have been gormless about it. He wasn’t simple.’

  ‘Like me?’

  I merely sighed. Before I began the last braid, Mordecai ranged to the fridge and browsed the groceries Truman had installed yet again that afternoon.

  ‘Food aid is disastrous anyway,’ Mordecai declared into the ice box.

  ‘Creates a dependency economy; local markets dry up. Ethiopia’s turned permanent panhandler, eighty per cent fed by

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  the WFP.’ Having picked through the upper shelves, he returned with an unopened camembert, neatly crated like a Red Cross airdrop.

  Truman stared at the box. A vein on each temple had risen and was pulsing a vivid blue. He didn’t eat a lot of cheese (it was greasy and constipating) but did allow himself a morsel before dinner with his wine, and I dare say that one wheel would have lasted him a week—under ordinary circumstances.

  No such luck. Mordecai unwrapped the velvety white puck on to the table and stabbed the rind with a table knife. When the ripe inside spilled on to the wood, he smeared it up with a moistened finger, then sucked the cheese from under his yellowed nail. In about sixty more seconds he had dispatched a third of the wheel.

  ‘That’s my cheese.’

  I looked around to see who had said that. I didn’t recognize the voice, which was deep and low and horribly controlled.

  ‘What did you say?’ Mordecai’s knife froze over his next wedge.

  Truman cleared his throat. ‘I said, that’s my cheese.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Mordecai. He glanced at his brother as if Truman were crazy. But also as if he were dangerous.

  Maybe it seems bonkers, Troom popping up with ‘that’s my cheese’

  all of a sudden, but I had some insight at the time. If I may avoid clichés about straws and camels, we had read a book as children called The Boy Who Swallowed the Sea, about a kid who could suck the ocean into his mouth, leaving fish flopping on the sea floor so that his friend could run about collecting the catch into a sack. The boy warned his friend that he could only hold in the ocean for so long. His friend paid no heed, and kept stuffing his sack until finally the boy could no longer contain the water inside his cheeks. I don’t remember the ending too well besides that the friend was drowned, but I picture at first a little dribble down the boy’s chin, just like ‘That’s my cheese’ burbled out of Truman, before the sea of his indignation spewed over Heck-Andrews and consumed his brother.

  Truman himself may have had no idea why the camembert in particular oozed from the ocean of impositions he had swallowed—all the pilfered cases of wine and sandwiches and leftover chicken. The trouble was, conventions between people are established overnight. Maybe if we’d told Mordecai the very first time he

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  reached into our refrigerator that he wasn’t to filch food he didn’t buy, he’d have made the odd trip to Harris Teeter himself, though I find that hard to imagine, both Mordecai in Harris Teeter at all and Truman or I saying any such thing without being pushed to the absolute limit. Yet furtive presumption becomes unabashed presumption in no time; privileges advance to rights.

  Though side-eyeing Truman as if the boy had lost his marbles, Mordecai also took the mauled cheese and wrapped it up in cling-film and put it away in the refrigerator, which was collectively on a par with Helen Keller folding her napkin. Truman took a sip of Mordecai’s third glass of wine. Mordecai didn’t reach for it again; Truman moved the glass to his place. In fact, Mordecai absented himself after I hurriedly finished plaiting his third braid. It hung crooked for the rest of the night, like a question mark—quizzical, perplexed.

  The following Saturday our first prospective buyers came to view the house. At first I worried for George and Magnolia Johnson, since all week Truman had been practising his rudeness for their tour. At least we needn’t strew towels through the house and leave food on the floor, as we had for Tom Wheeler—we had Mordecai.

  I don’t know if Truman would have been able to pull off a frosty demeanour; he was naturally too decent. In any case, when we opened the door a cold shoulder was abruptly out of the question. The Johnsons were black.

  When we were young, a good proportion of the discrimination cases our father handled involved housing—black families trying to purchase property in solid white neighbourhoods would find their bids turned down and the houses hurriedly sold to white couples. It didn’t take much digging to discover that in many instances the new owners had underbid the black buyers and still got the house. These flagrant civil rights violations in Raleigh were largely a thing of the past, but subtler practices like accepting a higher bid without giving the black buyer a chance to return a better offer or realtors simply not showing certain properties to black buyers were still not unheard of. Truman might rail against the slopes or Mordecai write off bongos in Africa, but our father had made marginal headway with his children, and with blacks at the door we were all smiles.

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  Magnolia Johnson was a tall, elegant woman with spindly legs and a remote, collected manner; when Truman shook her narrow hand he crushed it. Her husband George was round-faced and robust; yet his two-jaw smile gleamed with a funny conditionality, as if his glad-handing could turn on a dime. They were both better dressed, I think, than even most well-off whites would have been for a Saturday afternoon real estate foray—Magnolia was wearing a green raw silk suit, tasteful accents of gold jewellery and a sable coat. George’s three-piece was tailored to smooth his paunch, and when we shook I noticed his chunky watch was spinning with extra dials. That his tie was of Ghanaian kente cloth had a bit of an in-your-face quality, though George had hardly arrived in a dashiki.

  They were polite but never gushy—they weren’t Toms. This part of the country may have come a long way since 1964, but when we opened that door the Johnsons knew very well we were thinking, Oh, fuck, they’re black, and we knew they were thinking, That’s right, what of it—welcome to the New South, too bad, and watch yourselves, we know the law. Their having rocked up at the McCreas, this subtext was more convoluted still, since Truman and I felt compelled to insinuate you don’t understand! We’re on your side! Our father was a renowned civil rights advocate! Though somehow from the straight-backed bearing of this couple I suspected we would simply inspire, so what, do you want us to kiss your feet or something? and we would only dig ourselves in a hole.

  Therefore, when George mentioned in his introductions that he was a lawyer, Truman commented, ‘Is that right? You must have known our father, then.’

  ‘Who might that be?’

  ‘McCrea, of course. Sturges McCrea.’ Truman looked expectant.

  George’s face remained blank. ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘Sturges Harcourt McCrea,’ Truman insisted.

  ‘Nope,’ said George firmly. ‘Can’t say I had the pleasure. He was—?’

  ‘Another lawyer,’ said Truman, deflating. ‘Never mind.’

  The only thing that got up Truman’s nose more than all the people he met who remembered his father was meeting someone who didn’t.

  ‘You and your wife the owners?’ asked George as Truman led them to the parlour.

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  ‘Sister. With one other brother,’ said Truman, ‘and the ACLU.’

  The Johnsons didn’t pick up on this. So much for making points as heart-in-the-right-place white folk.

  Where before we’d been grateful for scattered drinks glasses, smelly socks and stale, overflowing ashtrays, now the shambles embarrassed us. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ said Truman. ‘My brother’s a slob.’

  They were duly admiring of the architecture, and
Truman warmed.

  ‘This house has a long history of lawyers,’ he narrated. ‘It was designed in 1872 by G. S. H. Appleget—I’ve got a picture of him framed upstairs.

  Carpetbagger, probably got the land for a song, but he was at least good at his job. Designed four other houses in the neighbourhood, but this one’s the most magnificent. It was built for Colonel Jonathan Heck, who was a lawyer and an officer, I’m afraid, on the wrong side of the war—what can you do, this is North Carolina. The Heck family sold to A. B. Andrews, another Raleigh lawyer, in 1916, and that’s where the house gets its name.’

  Truman had a future on the Capital City Trail. When we reached the kitchen, Magnolia exclaimed, ‘Oh, dear, we’d have to do this over, wouldn’t we?’

  With a shudder, I had a vision of this room lost to the Johnsons at auction, our criss-crossed wood and tacked-tin counters slapped over with spotless white Formica, the loyal yellowed porcelain sink lost to stainless steel with a disposal; the funky ash cabinets scrapped for walnut veneer with spring closures, the oak floor glued over with E-Z-Kleen lino. A lot of cold classy equipment, sleek low-slung kettles from Conran’s and avant-garde tableware whose spoons you couldn’t tell from the forks. The Johnsons wouldn’t be nostalgic about Reconstruction.

  When they ducked into the carriage house, Magnolia supposed she’d return the outbuilding to servants’ quarters. I sensed a taste for turned tables; I bet Magnolia’s maid would be white.

  Truman led them upstairs, and apologized that people were sleeping in four of the bedrooms (it was only 3 p.m.), but we might peek inside.

  When she ducked her head into the master bedroom, Magnolia cried,

  ‘Pee-yew!’ and held her nose.

  Gracious as he’d become, Truman must have got nervous about doing too fine a sell, since on the way to the dovecot he tried to put them off with Gladys Perry.

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  ‘When my parents bought this house it was pretty run down, and I don’t think it’s ever quite recovered. Gladys Perry was the last owner, some really ancient creature who wore scads of talcum powder; neighbourhood kids thought she was a ghost. She lived by herself and was obsessed with saving money. She became a virtual homeless person in her own house—collecting huge black garbage bags full of you-didn’t-want-to-know. The family across North Street say they’d see her shifting these bags back and forth all day; they worried she didn’t feed herself, and sometimes left her covered dishes on the porch.