A Perfectly Good Family

  But there was no way, lying on the couch, that I was going to sleep.

  I kept rehearsing a story that Truman had told me only once. While small, short, and even ordinary in its way, the tale of ninety minutes in this dovecot two years earlier had printed itself with cinematic clarity on my brain, perhaps because it was the real-life version of every child’s nightmare.

  My father was due back from Durham. Another meeting, nothing special. My mother had tapped on Truman’s door around midnight, the timid tiddle-tiddle of her nails setting his teeth on edge. She poked in and said Sturges was awfully late and she was concerned. Truman was impatient. He said, ‘You know Father, he stays and talks to people forever, and it’s a good half hour from Durham.’

  She’d padded back to her bedroom in slippers, though Truman realized she wanted to come upstairs. Later he must have hated himself for not keeping her company, though there’d been so 262

  many other evenings when he’d been just as terse and closed and stony that if Truman were to hate himself for every one of them he’d hate himself pretty much all the time. Come to think of it—maybe he did.

  An hour later, Mother hadn’t stopped to knock as she’d been trained to, but shuffled straight into Truman’s bedroom, though her son was a married man now, with a naked wife on his arm. She shook his shoulder. ‘Truman?’

  This time it was I who trundled into his bedroom to rouse my brother and whisper, I can’t sleep, I’m worried, adding, he’s not back yet and he’s nowhere else to go. Truman mumbled much what he’d told our mother two years before: if there’s anything wrong, we’re sure to hear. Go back to bed.

  But my mother had remained hovering at his bedside, while Truman’s standard irritation battled a five-year-old’s butterflies. As a boy, the nights Mordecai babysat, Truman had stayed awake for hours listening for our parents’ car. He was always afraid something dreadful had happened to them, and the perfumed peck on his forehead and brusque Eu-GEENya! Let’s get a move on! would constitute his final memory of our mother and father. Older, you get casual, credulous, but the child’s mistrust is actually more intelligent.

  At last the phone arrested Mother’s fussy folding down of Truman’s bedspread. It was 1.20 a.m., too late for Common Cause fundraising or gossip from my aunt. The dovecot had a separate phone line, so they could only hear it purring from downstairs. Troom said, ‘I bet that’s him now.’ But he thought: I should really get up and answer that for her. He didn’t. She bustled to catch it, though I figure if she had that flight to run over again she’d have taken her time, savouring the last few seconds of her life in one piece. The ring cut off. Truman held his breath. A minute passed. And then a cry rose from the master bedroom like a wild animal’s, and it didn’t stop and he knew what it meant and that once again Truman would be called upon to be the one good son.

  I, too, paused in the darkness of Truman’s bedroom, but no phone purred from below, no ululation curdled up the stairwell. Hooo-IH-hooo…hooo…hooo…Morning doves soothed from the yard. After a while I shambled back to my sofa. There I remained rigid, face up. What kept running through my head was the kind of sophisticated ethics my father had drilled into his children,

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  easy axioms of don’t-fib and thou-shalt-not-kill qualified with more demanding reminders that there are lies of omission and crimes of simply doing nothing, and by Sturges Harcourt McCrea’s exacting standards we were murderers.

  All repetition arrives with variation. In fact, the phone downstairs didn’t ring until three.

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  20

  At Rex Hospital, Truman and I filled in Mordecai’s admission papers; our brother was in no condition to sign his name. I clued up pretty quickly as to the primary purpose of these forms; the section about drug allergies was a mere while-you’re-at-it.

  ‘Mr McCrea was carrying a Blue Cross-Blue Shield card, ma’am,’

  clipped the reception nurse. ‘It was expired.’ She made a face, as if Mordecai had been wearing dirty Y-fronts.

  Truman whispered, ‘If Mordecai wasn’t even covering Decibelle, what are the chances he had any health insurance for himself?’

  ‘Zero,’ I said, and turned to the nurse. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘We’ll need some guarantee of payment, ma’am. A credit card imprint would do. We accept…’

  ‘Put it on mine,’ said Truman, taking out his wallet.

  I stayed his hand. ‘Our brother’s broke,’ I said to the receptionist.

  ‘What if we weren’t here?’

  ‘We do accept indigents, but for emergency care only,’ she said, nose in the air.

  ‘Corlis!’ said Truman, straining to offer his card. ‘We have to—’

  ‘On the phone we were told he might need surgery,’ I pursued, still holding Truman’s wrist. ‘Are you telling me that if my brother couldn’t pay for it, you wouldn’t do it?’

  ‘That’s correct, ma’am.’

  I took Truman’s credit card and tossed it through the window, the way Mordecai had frisbeed Truman a C-note. ‘Not that long ago you people wouldn’t accept blacks. Current policies don’t strike me as all that improved.’

  ‘This is not a charity ward, Mizz McCrea.’ She slapped the machine over Truman’s card with a flourish.

  ‘All I can say is, thank fucking hell I voted for Bill Clinton.’

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  ‘There’s no need to curse, ma’am.’ Truman was now physically dragging me across the lino. ‘And North Carolina voted overwhelmingly for George Bush,’ said Miss Priss behind me.

  ‘God!’ I exclaimed. ‘Take me back to London!’

  ‘Corlis, this is no time to get into politics.’

  ‘It’s just the time! This is real politics, Troom. Not a load of waffle and bunting.’

  Of course, alienating the admission nurse was a mistake; our frequent inquiries about the state of our brother were met with a cool lack of urgency.

  After an hour, a doctor emerged with an update. Mordecai would need an operation on his back; a length of spine was crushed. An anes-thetist had advised delay until morning; the alcohol levels in the patient’s bloodstream were so extreme that putting him under could be dodgy.

  ‘I should warn you—’ The doctor touched an elbow of my tightly crossed arms. ‘According to the X-rays, three vertebrae are compacted; extensive nerve damage is inevitable. There’s a high likelihood that your brother will have lost the use of his legs.’

  ‘Permanently?’

  The physician took a breath; no doubt he had to decide all the time how much hope to offer relatives, and as to whether too much or too little did the most harm he seemed of two minds. ‘There are therapies,’

  he said reluctantly. ‘Let’s skip the second-guessing until we have a clearer picture, shall we?’ He squeezed my shoulder.

  Truman went to ring Averil, whom we had left behind on the premise that she’d ‘lost enough sleep over Mordecai already’. I’d already rung Dix from the house, and when she said, ‘Keep me posted’ rather than

  ‘See y’all at Rex,’ I knew Mordecai’s marriage was scotched for good.

  Truman returned to slump in the seat at my side and announced soddenly, ‘It’s all my fault.’

  He sounded like Mordecai. Truman blamed himself for everything and Mordecai blamed other people for everything, but the absolutes were two sides of the same asinine coin. In truth, it’s-all-my-fault was a plea for me to absolve him every bit as utterly as Truman damned himself, but I wouldn’t cooperate.

  ‘We might have tried to stop him from driving, but I doubt we’d have succeeded. What is your fault is that Decibelle’s assets 266

  have been sent to the Twilight Zone. Limited liability, OK?’

  ‘I could have scooped up his keys before he did—’

  ‘Leave it!’

  I guess Mordecai had been ploughing aimlessly around Raleigh in the truck. His wife wanted him decapitated, and his house had been co-opted by a fair-weather sister and a gu
llible brother who’d fashioned far grander revenge than the kid ever intended—where could Mordecai rest his head? I do not imagine, however, that his veering off the Cary Road and flipping the truck a full roll in a ditch was intentional. Mordecai may have not been a seatbelt sort of guy, but he was not self-destructive. He was destructive of everyone and everything around him instead. At least this time he’d not dragged an innocent down with him, so there was balance, if not justice, in the crumpling of a drunken driver two years after his father’s death at such similar hands. (As so often in such incidents, the tippler who ran my father into an interstate rail tumbled about his two-door like a baby and got off with a broken ankle.)

  ‘The auction’s in four hours,’ said Truman. He sounded embarrassed at bringing it up. ‘I guess you want to let it go, huh?’

  I used my thumbnail to press cuticles down one by one, as if counting up pros and cons. I’d enjoyed my brief burst of chuck-the-past, let’s-get-on-with-our-lives, hasn’t-that-house-become-merely-divisive, but down to the wire I was abruptly disinclined to throw myself, among other people, out on the street in four hours. If Truman and I thought we were exhausted at eleven, we were now catatonic, and I wanted a home to collapse in. The decision may have come down to this primitive and trivial a matter: I was in no mood, with my older brother crippled on the other side of that wall, to move house.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said at last. ‘I’m not all that keen to have some little twerp scotch-taping lollipop trees to my bedroom wall. And the idea of a spanking new mod-con kitchen in 309 makes me want to hurl.’

  Truman looked up at me and smiled. ‘You’re in, then? You and me against the Japanese?’

  ‘No, Truman,’ I said firmly. ‘Not you and me. You heard Mordecai.

  If we buy him out, the money will go to his creditors.’

  ‘You swallow that business about bankruptcy?’

  ‘Why not?’

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  ‘What has Mordecai ever neglected to exaggerate by a factor of ten?’

  Truman said this with surprising affection.

  ‘Since when has he exaggerated failure, Truman? Big contracts, big expertise, yes. But whether or not Father was bowled over, Decibelle is Mordecai’s greatest achievement. If he’s sufficiently against the wall to admit, to us of all people, that his darling company is in a state of collapse, I’m inclined to believe him. Besides which, Mordecai’s a train wreck in there. You want him to have no one to take care of him, nowhere to convalesce?’

  ‘Oh, I guess not.’ Truman scuffed at the lino with his gumsoles. ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘Show up at the Jaycee Center, and buy it off the ACLU for the three of us. We already own three-quarters, right? No problem financing that last 25 per cent. Screw the Japs, we can go as high as we have to.’

  ‘All three of us?’ Truman squeezed his fingers between his knees; his neck extended parallel to the floor like a turtle’s. ‘You mean, like, Mordecai staying in the house— staying?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I think the sheer hideousness of the vision recommended it as proper penance for donating Decibelle’s assets to Florida. Truman put his face in his hands and mumbled through his palms, ‘Oh, all right. Averil’s going to die.’

  ‘But Mordecai isn’t,’ I reminded him. ‘There’s at least that. And you’re glad. Right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Truman with a sigh. At which point I regarded our family as having made some tangible progress.

  I stood up and stretched. ‘We can’t do any good here. Let’s go home, get showered, have breakfast, and go buy our own fucking house.’

  The Jaycee Center was a prosaic brick one-storey sprawl, and Room 112 was a far cry from the dark, sconced hall full of stoogie-puffing toffs where I imagined auctions were properly conducted. The Formica desk and rows of blue plastic chairs replicated a primary school classroom. Though Truman and I were more than on time, the Japanese couple had preceded us, having demurely assumed a back row; we shot them refrigerated smiles and took our rightful places at the front.

  Within a few minutes, we were joined by the Johnsons; three 268

  other couples that I recognized from cursory tours of Heck-Andrews; David Grover, who must have come in an observer capacity and once more struck me as terribly handsome; and two suited men, whom I did not recall having met. I whispered to Truman that I’d never seen them before, and he grimaced. ‘ Developers’, he determined, as if the devil himself had sent his fiends to leer at these proceedings disguised in ties, and only Truman could spot the hellspawn for what they were.

  Presumably developers wouldn’t bother to poke their heads inside Heck-Andrews, since all they could see when they looked at our house was a high-rise car park.

  The court commissioner, our auctioneer, pulled out his chair at the front desk and opened his briefcase with a nod to the boys and girls.

  The feeling in the room was halfway between an arithmetic test and a relay race, and I expected the commissioner either to announce we had fifteen minutes and we should put our pencils down when we were finished and no talking, or to unholster a gun, shout ready-set-go, and shoot out one of the ceiling tiles.

  There was no question about anyone talking. Each party was surrounded by empty seats, the way we had to sit in third grade so that nobody cheated. We shot one another compressed little smiles when caught sizing up the competition, but no one seemed under the illusion that the people in this room were anything short of outright antagonists.

  The commissioner began with information we all knew; he was soft-spoken, and the buyers strained forward to hear. When he started the bidding at the ridiculously low figure of $250,000, I missed the blended monotone I associated with an auctioneer, I’ve-got-two-seventy-five-two-seventy-five-do-I-hear-three-hundred-going-once-going-twice-THREE!-three-hundred-do-I-hear…, that mesmerizingly unintelligible keen like a Catholic mass in the days it was still in Latin. No, this man had no romance whatsoever, and the primary school aura of the event only intensified when we all raised our hands at once to meet the early figures, as if we each knew the square root of sixteen.

  The price rose in jumps of twenty thousand rapidly to $350,000, and each time George Johnson or an agent of Mephisto flicked his fingers Truman stabbed his hand in the air. Ever the good student, Truman was easy to picture in grade school, never wisecracking or folding cootie detectors at his desk, but vigilantly following the 269

  lesson while his classmates were reading Spiderman, sopping spitballs, and jeering at the goody-two-shoes in the front row.

  I noticed the Japanese were keeping their hands folded, and wondered if they’d simply come along to witness this quaint American custom until the price hit $370,000; two couples and one developer dropped out, having hoped, no doubt, that a court-ordered auction would be serendipitously ill-attended and they could walk off with prime property for a song. In their stead, our eastern friends began to bid, the man never raising his single forefinger above shoulder-high. Each buyer had a distinctive style of indication, the remaining developer’s flip of the hand almost sideways, sneering, while Truman jabbed his arm perfectly vertical, like a Sieg heil! salute.

  The auctioneer began to jack up the price $10,000 a go; at $410,000

  we lost the Johnsons, at which point I let the nightmare vision of our kitchen hanging with matching Conran’s pots mercifully vanish from my future. One more couple quit at $420,000, but the second developer persisted to $440,000. When he appeared to have given up hopes for expanded downtown parking, Truman’s eyes lit with evangelistic triumph, and he turned to me with an Onward-Christian-Soldiers gloat at good smiting evil.

  At $450,000, it was down to the McCrea kids and the Japs. Though, true to their race’s reputation, the faces of our remaining rivals remained largely impassive, I did detect a shadow of confusion ripple over the little man’s brow as we met $470,000 and $480,000 without hesitation.

  In fact, the last few minutes of this exercise achieved the surreal quality
of my dreams, the price rising and rising with no end in sight. Despite their renown as cold customers, the Japanese at our auction, in their willingness to so exceed the official value of Heck-Andrews, must have been bidding with a degree of infatuation. $500,000, $510,000, $520,000…something about our Reconstruction mansion had captured their imagination, the way so many profoundly American emblems—Big Macs, Big Head Todd and big tits—had caught on in Tokyo. When Truman once again stuck his hand up at $560,000, the couple in the back looked to their laps, and bowed slightly. Sold, to the gentleman in the front.

  It had been giddy, being able to bid as high as we liked, since every raise of $10,000 only cost us $2,500. David Grover was beaming, since the real winner was the ACLU, which would now

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  get several thousand more than if the organization had settled for a quarter of the appraisal. Then, such inflated beneficence would only have delighted my father. And I enjoyed our determined fidelity to what was no longer a mere house even to me, but a threesome united for the first time in our lives. $560,000 for that house may have been absurd, but there seemed worse foolishness than overvaluing your own family.

  It has been three-quarters of a year since Mordecai arrived home, his month in Rex Hospital having given Truman time to fashion ramps for the front and back stoop, and to install a wheelchair lift on the main stair and handrails in the bath.

  We also managed to pick up the odd bit of furniture from local auctions—Troom and I acquired a taste for them, and grew accomplished at appearing blasé about the loveseat we were, in truth, desperate to snap up. The kitchen table and chairs were first, without which the social fabric of our little crew would have disintegrated completely. Yet for the rest we’ve been picky, having learned that possessions are not to be assumed lightly—Truman’s kid might be saddled with unsightly investments for the duration. Little by little the household has taken shape, and the new version is spare, funky and belligerently American.

  That first March afternoon when Truman lifted his brother from the Volvo and wheeled Mordecai up the back porch ramp making vroom-vroom noises I realized that something more profound than Mordecai’s mobility had changed. Even more than I, Truman had regarded his brother as someone who didn’t need his help, and Truman cannot relate to autonomous wise-guys who scorn his samaritanism. Confined to a wheelchair, abandoned by his cronies, no longer flapping a six-figure chequebook, Mordecai has ceased to intimidate. Moreover, I doubt Truman gives his brother a hand in the loo or hauls Mordecai into bed out of guilt or duty; as he relishes hefting my luggage, he likes putting brawn to practical use.