A Perfectly Good Family Read online

  7

  ‘A 1921 reference book?’ I shrugged. ‘Try looking up “microchip”.’

  ‘That first edition is valuable.’

  ‘The stereo is valuable,’ I said. ‘So’s that vase.’ So’s the house. It was marvellous, what people in my family left out.

  Truman tapped the black spines. ‘Every time Mordecai deigned to come back home—to ask for another “loan”—he’d drool over these books and talk about how he could hardly wait to inherit the set. To their faces. While they were alive and not very old and in good health!

  That call you got from me two weeks ago, you knew you’d get it some day, but I’m sure you were dreading it. Mordecai had been drumming his fingers by the phone. When I called him the day she died, I was sure the first thing that went through his mind was, goodie, now I get the Britannicas. For that matter, remember the Living Will?’

  ‘Who could forget?’ I groaned.

  ‘Not Mother, that’s for sure. Mother remembered it, all right. Often.’

  This is not the kindest introduction to my older brother. Seven years earlier, in 1985, we had gathered in this parlour at my parents’ request.

  I’d flown down from New York City where I was living at the time, though summoning Mordecai from only a mile away was the greater achievement. He’d only agreed to come when he heard their family conference had something to do with money.

  My parents had arranged themselves on the couch, not wanting to begin without Mordecai, who had learned from my father that important people keep others waiting. Once my older brother galumphed in the door an hour late, with a curious glance around the mansion as if he’d never been here before, we three children faced the couch and fidgeted; all that was on offer was black coffee.

  My mother took photocopies out of a file folder and passed them around like a handout in school. She presided. In bold on the top of my copy read: A LIVING WILL. My mother proceeded to explain that as medical advances these days often make it possible for comatose or vegetative patients to live for years on life support, it was increasingly common for adults of sound mind to record in writing what their wishes might be in circumstances where they were no longer competent.

  8

  ‘Father and I—’ she never called him Sturges to us, only Father.

  ‘—wanted you children to know that we’ve signed these pledges, verifying that we don’t want any heroic measures—’

  ‘You mean, expensive measures,’ Mordecai had interrupted.

  ‘Yes,’ Mother agreed evenly, ‘hospital costs for PVS patients can be quite high—’

  ‘A thousand bucks a day,’ Mordecai provided. ‘And that’s before the twenty-dollar aspirins.’

  Mother may have coloured slightly, but she kept her composure.

  ‘These forms are not binding contracts in court,’ chimed in my father, the lawyer. ‘But they are admissible evidence, and doctors have increasingly used them consultatively when a family needs to make a decision.

  Euthanasia per se is not legal in the United States, but there have been precedents—’

  The photocopy was sticking to my fingers. My mother crafted an emotion in front of herself, much the way I worked up a sculpture—patting here, smoothing the rough edges, and only presenting it when fashioned to her satisfaction. My experience of real feelings, however, is that they do not take shape on a turntable in view, but loom from behind, brutal and square and heavily dangerous like a bag of un-wedged clay hurtled at the back of your neck. Feelings for me are less like sculpture and more like being mugged. Consequently, with no warning, I burst into tears.

  ‘Corrie Lou, whatever’s the matter?’

  I snuffled, ‘I don’t want to think about your dying,’ not sounding anywhere near twenty-eight years old.

  My father was probably embarrassed, maybe even touched, but his expression was one of irritation.

  Mother came over and stroked my hair, as she had when, rough-housing with my brothers, I’d skinned my knee—tender and purring, she was not really worried. She surprised me. Histrionic of the family, my mother should have, I thought, thrown both arms around me and wept as well, hearing those unheralded phone rings in my South Ealing flat years hence. But she was matter-of-fact. That was when I realized that most people do not fear their own deaths, really. Yours is the one death you are guaranteed not to live through; you will never have to suffer the world without you in it. She was in terror, I knew, of anything happening to my father, but as for the prospect of something 9

  happening to her beforehand she was positively hopeful.

  Mother scuttled to the foyer and retrieved one of those recycled Kleenex. Once I’d blown my nose in the shreds, I swabbed drips from their Living Will, smearing the print with pink lipstick. Meanwhile my father was explaining that your mother and I don’t consider life worth living if our minds are gone, and we would hate for your lasting memory of us to be as the parents who couldn’t remember your names.

  Meanwhile, Truman sat mutely in his chair and folded his Living Will in thirds. That he, too, did not get weepy was no testimony to lack of affection for his parents; if anything, Truman’s attachment to his forebears was of the three of us the most profound—too profound, in my view. He merely lacked imagination. Like foreign cities, the future was abstract; Mr Practicality would not mourn an event that hadn’t occurred yet.

  Mordecai, however, couldn’t keep seated. He was buoyant. ‘This is a bang-up idea.’ He fanned the photocopy, his three pigtails wagging across his leather vest. ‘Christ, we wouldn’t want what happened to Grandmother to happen to you guys. She just lay there for years, it must have cost a fortune! And insurance doesn’t always cover it, you know. Exceed the liability, that’s it, you sell the house, liquidate assets, a whole life’s savings down the IV tube.’

  At the mention of ‘sell the house’, Truman’s eyes had shot black.

  ‘You know,’ Mordecai went on, ‘sometimes photocopied signatures don’t hold up in court. You want to re-sign my copy? I’ll keep the form in my deposit box. Wouldn’t want it to get misplaced, right?’

  Allowing one corner of his mouth a spasm of incredulity, my father scrawled on Mordecai’s copy Sturges Harcourt McCrea, disdainfully il-legible; my mother penned her neat initials, EHHM, wincing.

  She bent to refill our coffee cups from the thermos and offered me another biscuit; my father scowled over The Christian Century—anything to avoid glancing at their eldest son. Before Mordecai lunged ebulliently to the door, one more time he sauntered to the Britannicas and caressed them, intoning, ‘The new edition is nowhere near as comprehensive.’

  ‘You got the feeling,’ Truman recalled, ‘that Mordecai would 10

  speed his army truck across town, running lights, in order personally to whip the life support from its socket the moment either of them drifted into a light sleep.’

  I conceded reluctantly, ‘He didn’t want them to waste his money on their hospital bills.’

  ‘Mordecai is crass,’ said Averil.

  It was an ugly word. ‘He’s thoughtless,’ I tempered. ‘A little avari-cious, and he’s always broke.’

  ‘He’s crass.’ Quiet and verbally economical, my sister-in-law seemed to have been searching for years for the right adjective, which she would not relinquish, like a prize.

  ‘As for the encyclopedias,’ said Truman, ‘it’s not that I want them, I just don’t want Mordecai to get them. They’re yours, Corlis, if you like.

  Though I doubt you’d want to pay to box and ship them all the way to England. Nuts, you know, nobody’s unshelved one in my lifetime.’

  Now I understood why I was nervous. There was something Truman hadn’t twigged yet, hardly his fault: I hadn’t told him. On the issue of the twenty black volumes, though, I wasn’t fooled. Truman was no anti-materialist. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about things, but that he cared about only one thing, in comparison to which the Britannicas were a trifle.

  11

  2

&nbs
p; I had Truman lug my bags to my old room on the second floor, one of seven spacious bedrooms, two with alcoves for handmaids—Heck-Andrews had been built in an era of visitors with hatboxes who came to stay for weeks. In fact, the house so exceeded our needs that my father had threatened to let out extra bedrooms to low income or homeless families. Through our childhoods Truman and I would plot the pratfall of beastly unwashed ruffians who were going to smell up the room next to mine and break all our toys. We should have relaxed.

  Yes, Sturges McCrea was sheepish about a mansion whose semi-attached carriage house had accommodated not only the original kitchen, but, in a fraction of the area, more servants than the main structure housed masters by half, when he helped found the SCLC. But Father’s guilty magnanimity never put him to personal inconvenience. He paid lip service, for example, to the equality of women, but never encouraged my mother beyond her part-time volunteer work to get a job, lest her distraction delay his supper. There had never been real danger of scruffy truants ransacking our cupboards while we were at school; my father didn’t like children any more than we did.

  Rather than board the less fortunate, two bedrooms were converted to studies (my mother’s half the size of her husband’s and doubling as the sewing room). At twenty-one, Truman had deserted his old lair next to mine for his renovated eyrie on the third floor. Mordecai’s former bedroom at the front (strategically placed opposite my parents’) had many years ago been shorn of its Jimi Hendrix posters, the nail holes gloppily plastered with my father’s usual ineptitude, the funk of un-laundered jeans and surreptitious fags air-freshened away; by the time he turned fifteen they’d realized he was not coming back. I was dis-heartened when

  12

  they cleaned his desk of SDS handouts, because I used to sneak into his vacated hovel and pocket treasures. At twelve, when I scrounged the Peace armband from his closet and blithely displayed it binding my peasant blouse as I waltzed out the back door, my mother had shrieked, her cheeks streaking, that I was becoming ‘just like my older brother!’

  This, I was led to believe, was the worst thing that could happen to anyone.

  Three halls formed a peg-legged H around the stairwell and master bathroom, down the longest of which I lingered as Truman fetched my carry-on. The hall was narrow with a window at the end, the floor slick enough to play Slippery Slidey in socks, indoor skiing with a running start that my mother discouraged because we reliably embedded splinters into our feet. I noted that Truman had replaced the rotting boards that had skewered us, a neat job. Truman inherited all the physical meticulousness that had skipped a generation with my father.

  I peeked into the last left-hand door, slammed in my face enough times. I switched on the overhead light, to find a bland bedspread and stark surfaces: no international gewgaws here. I walked to Mordecai’s desk, where the booze-bottle rings and reefer burns had been lemon-oiled into the past. The drapes were pulled back—replaced, since Mordecai had caught one of his old set on fire—while in his heyday they were always tightly drawn, even on the brightest of summer days.

  I scanned the blank walls and bare boards, but aside from the painted-over lumps of lousy spackling and the discernible scrapes in the floor from when my brother would shove his desk over to barricade the door, I detected no trace of Mordecai Delano McCrea. In my own room, midis drooped in my wardrobe, plastic horses spilled from its top shelf, my first clumsy attempts at clay sculpture humbled me on my bureau.

  Yet here was a malicious erasure. Not a single test tube from his chemistry set rolled in a dresser drawer, and all the old Herman Hesse paperbacks had been bagged and sent off to Goodwill. No stranger would imagine this had ever been anything other than a guest room.

  As I sometimes fudged to a Londoner that I was born in New York, I wondered if my parents had indulged the pleasant fiction with the odd out-of-towner that they had only two children.

  My footfalls rang hollow back down the hall. I had this entire floor to myself: a drastic privacy I had craved as an adolescent, 13

  yearning for evenings like this one when my parents would disappear.

  Now that I had got what I wished I didn’t want it, which goes to show there is no pleasing some people. When my father was alive Mahler and Ives thrummed through this mansion all the way to the tower deck, but with no symphonic bombast tyrannizing the stairwell, no more

  ‘Tommy’ pounding from down the hall, no lilting alto of ‘I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger’ wending from the kitchen while my mother made pies, this cavernous structure was deathly quiet, and I was grateful for so much as the thump of my case as it fell from Truman’s exhausted hand, and even for the piping of my sister-in-law, whose nasal, peevish voice would ordinarily annoy me.

  As Truman lumbered up the next flight to grill chicken thighs, I shouted after him. ‘Why are you cooking up there? You’ve an enormous kitchen downstairs, and your kitchen is a closet.’

  ‘I always cook in the dovecot.’ He kept walking.

  He always cooked in the dovecot, and that was reason enough, as he always had the same breakfast, mowed the lawn the same day of the week, and now that he was in college I figured that Duke’s varying his academic schedule must have plunged him into interior disarray for half of every semester. Truman’s disciplines were so strict not because they were solid but because they were shaky. In my little brother’s personal mythology, should he nibble a single biscuit between meals, lift weights on Friday instead of Thursday, or allow himself an extra half-shot of bourbon before bed, he would degenerate into a flabby dissolute overnight. Truman trusted everyone but himself.

  As I unpacked, Averil swayed in the doorway, her eyes following each pair of jeans to its drawer. She seemed to be counting them, like Truman and my glasses of wine.

  ‘Whatever happened with your room-mates?’ she enquired. ‘You said one was cute.’

  ‘I said they were both cute.’

  ‘Which one did you like better? The runty guy with glasses, or the drunken thug?’

  I laughed. ‘In Britain, you’d say hooligan. Which he wasn’t, quite. But which did I like better? I guess I never made up my mind.’

  ‘Well, did you ever, you know?’ Averil may have found my sexual peripatetics ‘disgusting’—her favourite word—just as 14

  Truman himself lumped everyone I had ever dated into the categories of ‘lunatic’ or ‘waste product’. Yet like most who married as virgins or nearly so, she displayed a disapproving but keenly prurient curiosity about the love lives of the wayward.

  ‘It’s inadvisable,’ I said, ‘to get romantically involved with flatmates.

  Even in South Ealing, flats are expensive and hard to come by; you don’t want to complicate matters. The three of us were agreed on that.’

  ‘So you left them alone after all?’

  ‘After all,’ I said, ‘they have left me alone. I will miss them.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  I had unwrapped a piece of ceramic from my leggings, and set it on the dresser by the wobbly elephant from my first firing at ten. ‘A souvenir.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  I shrugged.

  My sculptures were distinguished by their hands: oversized in relation to the figure and always finely wrought, attenuated fingers extended from a tendonous metacarpus. The severed hand Averil now rested in her palm was reaching for something, or someone, and without the rest of the figure attached no longer appeared youthfully desirous, but merely grasping.

  ‘It’s beautifully done,’ she admired. ‘I can’t imagine making something so delicate out of clay. But why is it broken off?’

  ‘Because that’s the left hand,’ I explained, ‘and it didn’t know what the right one was doing.’

  We trudged up the second flight of stairs where, according to Truman’s lore, we were entering another residence altogether. If I were to assert that my younger brother had never left home by thirty-one, he would object. Ten years before, he’d refurbished the top floor into an independen
t flat; he liked to regard the fact that his address tags still read ‘309

  Blount Street’ and his zip code hadn’t changed since he was two as mere coincidence.

  We had designated the third floor ‘the dovecot’, since the mansard roof was infested with pigeons, though the scampering overhead could sound ominously like rats. The pigeons had nested on the pediments over the dormer windows, whose overhangs didn’t protect the panes from being continually splattered with bird poo. Truman spent a lot of time squeegeeing. Truman lived

  15

  to squeegee; all the humdrum toil my father deplored as distraction from the Great Questions my little brother regarded as the meat of life.

  I did feel a release on rising to the long central room in Truman’s hideaway, with its tall, round-headed window at the end, where the spiral staircase curled to his tower. The rooms adjoining this one all had at least one sloping wall, from the slant of the roof; in the cockeyed tilt lurked a sense of humour, which the ponderous lower floors could well afford. Truman’s aesthetic may have been backward-looking, but in the runaway eclecticism of downstairs there was no coherent aesthetic at all. He had a prejudice against any furniture made in his lifetime, which suggested a self-dislike. I think if Truman could have wished himself back a hundred years he would. He was always pining about the days when hard work was rewarded and a man was a man and you did what you had to do and life was simple. I personally didn’t believe life was ever simple, though I could see fancying the illusion.

  Truman hated his own time, and expressed his nostalgia in bygone appointments, mostly glommed from the boot sales of other children with dead parents. His offbeat furniture wasn’t restricted to a single era—his couch was Victorian, end-tables Edwardian, and there was one upright armchair in his living room, ridiculously carved, that I do not believe belonged to any era at all. But together the hodgepodge formed a family whose members all got along, which was more than you could say for ours.