A Perfectly Good Family (2 page)

He nodded at the tomes to my left, each volume five inches thick. ‘I don’t think we should let Mordecai have the Britannicas.’
Matt black with gold inlay, the Britannicas’ aura resembled that of the vase, though where the celadon was smug the encyclopedias were scholarly, old-school, elitist. Written before HIV and even the Second World War, they were pure, withdrawn; they dwelt on antiquity, and it was hard to imagine they chronicled anything sordid. The volumes were redolent of my father, with his imposing memory for dates and the first names of historical figures. As the only girl, I was raised to think of myself as not very bright: the Britannicas were smarter than I was; they shut me out.
‘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.

‘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 unwedged 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 twentyeight 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, roughhousing 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 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 illegible; 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 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 avaricious, 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.

I had Truman lug my bags to my old room on the second floor, one of seven spacious bedrooms, two with alcoves for handmaids—HeckAndrews 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 twentyone, 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 unlaundered jeans and surreptitious fags air-freshened away; by the time he turned fifteen they’d realized he was not coming back. I was disheartened when
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 carryon. 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 lemonoiled 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 paintedover 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, 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.