A Perfectly Good Family (12 page)

  Except that Mordecai would never have been digging boltholes to secure the fiction that he didn't really live at home. He'd leave. He did.

  Disdaining my mother's waiting hand, Truman had flipped the spare on to the table, where it skidded to the floor. 'You'd think at twentyone I could have a little privacy.' He stomped out.

  The Medeco scheme backfired entirely. My mother so relished her prize of the key to Truman's lair that she concocted excuses to stick her thorn in his side. Later she took to leaving her spare in the lock all the time, making a farce of his 'break-in' protection, but he left it there. The key had remained in his door since her death, after which she was free to haunt every floor of Heck-Andrews and no Medeco could stop her.

  To Truman, the tale was metaphor—this supposedly exemplary son had spent $35 and most of his adulthood trying to lock his mother out of his life. How short-sighted and hateful, when he knew the day would come when he called and got no answer and tapped with trepidation on the parlour door, to spy her curded thighs spread over scattered photographs of my father: behold, she grants his wish, and maybe he regarded her early death as

proper reprisal. I'd tried to explain that nothing could have kept him from thrashing to escape when she lassoed his throat, just as nothing could have convinced Eugenia Hadley Hamill McCrea to indulge Truman his dovecot hideaway and let him keep both keys. The workings of families are as fated as they are futile. Truman tortured himself, claiming he had pointlessly, pettily fought with my mother up to the very day before her heart attack. I'd assured him that had we taken him aside and said, 'Truman, tomorrow morning your mother will be dead,' he would still have argued brutally against buying more rickety aluminium lawn furniture on sale off-season. He'd have still called her a muckworm and slept that night never having apologized, with every certainty that on waking he would find her mouth open and her panties showing and he would have to decide whether to call first for a doctor or the police. Because that's the real thing, Truman, the real raw stuff of a family and it's good.

  Yet in his candid moments Truman regarded himself as the cruellest of us three. At least Mordecai and I had had the consideration to be oblivious out of view, and Mother could kid herself we were simply busy. Truman had turned his back to her face. He had replaced the slates because Mother was afraid of heights and the roof was one place he could be free of her. So he had a lot of nerve trying to trump his sister with his beneficent repairs, and that's why my brother was in tears.

  I'm afraid that by recoiling from my mother's smothering embraces, in moments of emotion I imitate my father instead: awkward, gruff, abashed, I forced my hand to Truman's shoulder and pressed as if the fingers were operated by remote controls. I have never been sure how to touch my brother as an adult. I kept my hand on his shoulder a stolid beat, looked at it like an object out of place to be tidied, and took it away.

  Truman honked into a paper towel. We had a drink. When we arranged our schedule for the week, I forced myself to use a hard ch, since apparently my Britishisms got up Truman's nose. We stayed up late, the air cleared, discussing approaches to Mordecai, and how much simpler this situation would become when he was no longer 'tenant in common' of our house. Even Truman said it: our house.

I made an appointment with a realty appraiser for Monday, 7

December. As the prospective buyers of our own house, we needed the valuation as low as possible. We didn't hoover.

  No, the Sunday before we filthied dishes and chucked them about the kitchen, and carted crusted cereal bowls to guest rooms. We unmade the beds, strewed the spreads, and pulled the fitted bottom sheets to expose mottled mattress covers. As Truman slumped curtain hooks off their rail, I dusted flour on carpets and walked it in; Averil flung socks down the halls. We pulled out dresser drawers to cough jumpers. While Truman sowed cans collected for recycling across our lawn, I unscrewed the bulbs in table lamps so that sickly overheads would defile the interior with a queasy glare. We kicked over our own rubbish bin, and neighbourhood dogs obligingly dragged chicken bones around the back.

  Yet there was little chance of returning the house for an afternoon to the astonishing $29,000 price tag my parents had met in cash. Behind wadded newspaper gleamed fine mahogany baseboard; under wet washcloths on doorknobs lurked antique brass; cold grey soapy water couldn't hide the grand claw-footed tub itself. In the dead pall of overheads, delicate dentil cornice nibbled the perimeters of every room. If you drew a finger through the rusty Carolina clay I had painstakingly dribbled across the mantle, there was no mistaking that underneath was solid rose marble.

  At lunch before our appointment, Truman saved the crusts from his ham sandwich to mash underfoot. We raced about gaping closets and cabinets open. It was my idea to leave the toilets unflushed, but Truman's horror prevailed.

  As the crowning touch we dressed for the occasion ourselves, scrounging nasty dust-balled shirts from under beds. Averil and I teased our hair, while Truman donned an old BASH THE BELTWAY cap backwards. We looked like white trash.

  Truman had worked up a vigorous hostility to Tom Wheeler, so when my brother opened the door I saw a superior satisfaction cross his features that the appraiser was fat. The man's dress sense matched ours: thin baggy suit, lavender tie. 'This guy's a hayseed,' Truman whispered to me in the foyer, the assumption being that anyone that overweight couldn't be clued up about architecture.

  Truman was arch, his offer of coffee stiff and more graciously declined. Wheeler said he would get right to work, thank you, and we trailed after him as he began touring our mansion with a notebook. In the parlour, he tripped over our splayed Britannicas while ogling the cornice. He ran his finger through my clay to reveal the mantle's marble. 'Looks like the maid hasn't been through here in a while,' he said mildly.

  'Mother isn't around to make us clean our rooms any more,' said Truman.

  I slouched on the couch, which we'd bunched with army blankets, assuming a slatternly sprawl but failing to distract him from examining the window frames—which were now, thanks to Truman, tightly puttied around nineteenth-century panes.

  In the kitchen, Wheeler cooed over the porcelain sink with its perpendicular X-shaped faucets, and the tacked tin countertop, which far from considered inconveniences were now retro-chic. He nudged away Truman's bread crust and examined the oak flooring, reaching for the sponge to dab off the mustard.

  As Wheeler caressed our black walnut banisters, Truman despaired up after him. 'It's an awfully old house—falling apart really. No one's maintained it for some time. My parents weren't fixer-upper types.'

  'She looks like a solid old girl to me!' When he tickled a gargoyle on the landing, I thought Truman might slap his hand.

  Wheeler proceeded to my room, where the stained knickers made less of an impression than the stained glass window. Another note.

  'Original fireplaces!' he exclaimed.

  'I guess,' Truman grumbled. We'd bunched mine full of my mother's used Kleenex.

  'They draw?'

  'No, they're totally stuffed up!'

  He worked the flu back and forth—oiled—and gawked up the clean brick. 'Looks good to me.'

  At the entrance to the dovecot Truman waylaid, 'That's just storage, you know. Junk.' But Mother's key was in the door, and Wheeler proceeded up the refinished stairs, to where Truman's uglification job had been the most half-hearted.

  'Separate apartment,' he noted. 'Raises the value considerably.' We peered up as he ascended the spiral staircase to the tower deck, from which he surveyed downtown Raleigh with such a big

breath and pat on his chest you'd think he was on the top of the World Trade Center.

  I had never seen Truman nearly so jealous over a man's coming on to his wife as he was over the appraiser's swooning at his house. With Truman always a step behind him, eyes following Wheeler's hands, the appraiser assumed a teasing little smile, and delivered a lascivious performance. He ambled back downstairs, stroking and mauling every inset tile and voluted sconce as if feeling up a skirt, and jiggling outside with such a proprietary swagger that I half expected him to ask for a cigar and highball. Circling the outside of Heck-Andrews the man had a field day, wolf-whistling at the buttress-flanked dormer windows, palpating pilasters and engaged balustrades on the bays, retreating out on to the front walk to leer over the attractive alternation of rectangular and imbricated tiles on the mansard roof. He sucked back a burble of drool to commend the ornamentation of the hoodmoulds in the four circular windows piercing Truman's tower; spittle webbed his mouth.

  'Pity about the missing corbels,' Wheeler hummed sadly, 'but they could be replaced.'

  On the porch the man gorged himself, cupping the bulbous turned balusters like breasts, fingering up the chamfered posts to fondle the faceted panels and decorative studs, patting the door's surround from ramp to backbend to fleur-de-lis.

  'One of the old panes is out,' Truman noted, but by this time his intrusions were lacklustre.

  'Congratulations,' Wheeler announced when he was through. 'You're sitting on a gold mine.'

  Bollocks.

  When they shook Truman's hand was limp. 'Sorry to put you to so much trouble,' Wheeler winked. 'Hell of a project, cleaning that up.'

  I sensed we were amateurs.

  The official appraisal arrived two days later: $410,000, and Wheeler included a note saying he wouldn't be surprised if we could get half a million bucks. The valuation was inconvenient, it would cost us, but at the same time I could tell Truman felt proud. He swept the clay, hoovered the flour and smoothed the bedding, in the affectionate repossession with which a gentleman takes a woman's arm after she has been insulted by the attentions of strangers.

  As for my grandstand—about how our father had the right to give his money to charity, how we deserved nothing, how inheritance is 'evil'—I never retracted it. Frankly, I had learned not only these magisterial sentiments from my father, but also how to use them as a cudgel.

  It's true that our generation was strong on uncertainties—we didn't believe in God, were embarrassed by our country, and had even flirted with right-wing departures from the Democratic Party. There was a price to pay for sand under our feet, and though I am not sure I would trade for the pavement on which my parents stood—or thought they stood—I could be envious of the illusion. Sturges McCrea had a way of making both his sons feel dilute, and he might have encouraged them instead to feel akin. Our father did have principles. Granted, he also had hypocrisies—he was officially a democrat and personally a demagogue—but you have to have standards in the first place to fail to live up to them.

  Though I don't recall his discussing the subject, my father probably would have looked askance at inherited wealth, though he would also, like a normal parent, have wished to leave something to his children—he did. I doubt he ever considered bequeathing the whole of his modest estate to the Fourth Child. It was devious of me to deploy Truman's inheritance to part him from it.

I was accustomed to running messages from HeckAndrews to Mordecai’s Basement; for years the only sparse communication between my parents and their eldest was through me. I would be sent with their forlorn invitation to Easter Sunday’s leg of lamb, and though I’d know the answer beforehand I’d leap at the pretext. My parents would be nervous on my account, as if sending me into an uncharted and perilous country from which they themselves were banished, and they always looked relieved when I returned seemingly unscathed.

Then, I was a double agent. At sixteen, I would slink into the Basement and report how last week our mother thought a ‘hooker’ was ‘someone who hooked people on drugs,’ and we’d hoot. On return home, I’d share my dismay that Mordecai had killed half a bottle of cognac in a sitting. I was everybody’s friend.

As a girl I had adored escaping to my older brother’s burrow, so when I took on the mission to appeal to him to settle the house partition out of court the eagerness returned. I had never lost my awe of this brother. Historically, I was perfidious—I got away with things, but I lied. Mordecai, however, had flaunted the very indiscretions I concealed. Craning over the banisters, I’d gawked at my brother in the foyer as he shouted at my mother for all the neighbourhood to hear that she ‘couldn’t tell him what to do with his own cock’. Cock! He said cock! He hadn’t disposed of gin bottles in next-door’s rubbish, but baldly upended them in our kitchen bin. He didn’t slip condoms in a sleeve of his wallet, but tossed them on his desk or, if used, in an unflushed commode. Once the eldest cut and run, Truman and I still had to be in bed by ten o’clock while Mordecai was living with two older women and shagging them both at the same time.

The reason we were given that Mordecai became so unruly was that our older brother was a genius. When at fourteen Mordecai took an intelligence test at NC State, he scored upwards of 160, in the range my parents informed us was ‘immeasurable’. My father often bemoaned that his eldest was ‘too intelligent for his own good’—the poor guy.

Meanwhile, neither of Mordecai’s successors was pegged as an intellectual powerhouse. My nickname was The Scatterbrain, since I often forgot my lunchbox, and no one thought to connect these amnesias with the days my mother packed ketchup and bologna sandwiches. Truman was christened The Tender Flower, as he cried a lot and was easily wilted. Surely recourse to Mordecai’s IQ was pure parental conceit—if Mordecai was unmanageable because he was brilliant, their genes were redeemed and their parenthood absolved. I can spot the self-interest as an adult; as kids we took our labels at face value. We believed that Mordecai was brainier than we were, and genius exempted him from the don’t-cuss/don’t-drink/don’t-fuck rules that continued to apply to us mental mortals.

If curse, hooch and nookie seem the lesser seditions of the time, rebelling against my father in the Sixties was problematic. Other Raleighites were blessed with proper flag-waving dads, dedicated Nixonians who wanted the
niggrahs
kept in their place and the Vietnam War to go on forever. These fortunate sons had strengthening family rows over whether they marched on Washington or cut their hair. But my father’s attitude towards Mordecai’s sprouting pigtails was
rueful
. A delegate for Eugene McCarthy in the Chicago convention of ’68, my father encouraged Mordecai to march on Washington, and threatened to come along. In retrospect, it’s surprising that my obtuse brother didn’t take to burning crosses on our own Oakwood lawn.