A Perfectly Good Family

  ‘I’d pay anything!’ Truman cried.

  ‘Are you so sure? I’ve looked at Garrison’s figures. You and my sister here want to buy me out of my birthright, ain’t that so? Bribe me with a bowl of soup?’ (Even Mordecai had been forced to go to Sunday school.) ‘The way I see it, you two already don’t quite have the cash to send both me and the ACLU packing. So what if this one golden evening with Mommy—her arms around your neck, asking how your day went, patting your head and slipping you a big dish of ice cream—cost you just enough money that you had to sell the house? What if keeping your mother around a tiny bit longer meant you lost your beloved fucking house? Would you take the trade? Really?’

  Truman took one of the unrinsed wine glasses and threw it on the floor. ‘Get out!’ he shouted.

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  Yet it was obvious to all present that stressing a point by breaking crockery was derivative. Earlier in the evening, Mordecai had smashed an object of far greater value that made a much more splendid crash.

  Mordecai stood and poured himself one more measure of aquavit; its caraway effluvium made me woozy.

  ‘Something of an accomplishment growing up in this lofty loony bin,’

  he announced, ‘I live in a world of balance sheets. I understand that everything costs, and I mean costs money. Even sentimentality you’ve gotta pay for. So if you’re going to go all wobbly over this house here, you’re going to have to fork out, OK? And you haven’t got all day. No way am I going to wait around for eons while you figure out how to save this dump. I’m going to Garrison next week to file for partition.

  The clock’s ticking, kid. This firetrap is going on the market whether you like it or not. Maybe it’ll go for three-eighty, maybe more. Maybe you and Corrie Lou can bid high enough for it, maybe not. Only one way to find out.’

  He knocked back the last of his liquor, and capped the bottle to go.

  ‘I’ve got to get to work. I’ll just leave you with the thought, kid: Would you swap your house for your mother? And be honest.’

  The back door slammed on an ugly question, since in a sense, as Mordecai well knew, Truman had replaced his mother with a house.

  While she was alive, he had lavished more abundant attention on this structure than he had on her, so that when Truman tenderly retouched baseboards and caulked the bath I suspect she was jealous.

  Truman finished the dishes in silence, while I wiped the table with the new sponge we’d bought that afternoon. He swept up the broken wine glass, searching out the least splinter, and left to collect shards of celadon in the parlour.

  Meanwhile I tried to jolly him, saying don’t worry about Heck-Andrews going up for auction, we’ll swing the price tag, whatever, and maybe Mordecai’s right, we should get this property settled, but I got no reaction. Truman looked desperate when there was nothing left to wash, and finally sat with Averil and me for a last glass of wine.

  ‘Are you relieved,’ Truman asked me, ‘that she didn’t live a long time?’

  ‘Of course not.’

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  He slumped. ‘I am.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘What Mordecai said,’ he proceeded morbidly, rubbing his eye with the back of his hand. ‘I’d thought about it. I was afraid she’d live forever.

  You’d be in England…Mordecai’s no use…I’d have been stuck. And now I got out of it, didn’t I?’

  ‘You’re whipping yourself,’ I said. ‘Give it a rest.’

  ‘You don’t know what it was like,’ said Averil. ‘The last two years.

  She never left us alone. She was always baking us pies.’

  ‘How terrible,’ I said.

  ‘Well, we don’t eat pies!’ said Averil. ‘She was fat. She wanted us to be fat, too. If I even left the crust, she’d slam cupboards.’

  Averil was right. When Mother handed my father half her slice, you could see her calculating that if her husband ate three times as much dessert as she did then she had to be dieting. Without him, she’d have plumped someone else to be eating less than. Mother had her truly generous moments, but would not have cannoned lemon meringues at Truman’s dovecot—and at his petite young wife—only to be kind.

  Fudge, pecan, peach crumble—you name it, my mother’s pastry shells were impeccably tooled and would have been aimed in a fusillade at her daughter-in-law’s gut.

  ‘We told her to stop once,’ said Averil quietly.

  My wine glass froze at my lips. ‘You didn’t.’

  Truman groaned. ‘That was horrible.’

  ‘She left another one,’ said Averil, ‘apple and walnut, lattice crust, by our door. Truman took it back downstairs. He was hoping to leave a note and sneak away, but she was home.’

  ‘Except for working at the hospice,’ Truman lamented, ‘she was always home.’

  ‘He said no, thank you,’ Averil went on. ‘We’d discussed it. We weren’t going to accept another pie. We always ate it, and then felt ill.

  We considered throwing them away, but knowing your mother, she’d find out.’

  ‘What happened? Did she cry?’

  Truman raked his fingers though his tight, curly hair. ‘It went on for hours! How I didn’t like her cooking—’

  I got up and banged cabinets, rattled silverware, picked up drying coffee cups and slammed them on the counter with my lips pressed white. ‘ I thought you liked my pie!’ I gasped. (My mother’s 52

  speech pattern was emphatic, as if were every word not anchored to its sentence with underlines it would wash out to sea.) ‘ All these years I suppose you’ve been doing me a favour?’

  Averil laughed. I stopped, abruptly. The imitation was too perfect.

  ‘Then she got into how I didn’t seem to want her around,’ said Truman. ‘And I didn’t, did I? How baking was one way she could be loving and stay out of my hair. So I said I didn’t want her affection in pie, damn it—’

  ‘You said damn?’

  ‘I said damn. She turned purple and said there was no need to curse.

  I said I didn’t like to eat a lot of sugar, but then she started on about Father, so…’

  ‘You ate the pie.’

  ‘Of course I ate the pie! I hugged her and she mopped her nose with those Kleenex used a hundred times and I dragged Averil down and we all sat around the table pretending everything was fine and the pieces she cut were enormous.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. With ice cream. And you finished the crust.’ I could see the scene clearly. My mother would bustle with napkins and pour root beer they didn’t want either and sit down to a ‘sliver’ herself with her eyes still puffy and bright red. She’d talk about her Aids patients at the hospice with a humble, apologetic lisping that failed to disguise her sense of victory.

  ‘It had raisins,’ said Averil blackly.

  ‘After that—did you keep getting pies?’

  ‘Yes.’ Truman sighed. ‘Only ever since, she acted nervous, maybe we didn’t want it and she’d offer to take it back or make an injured little joke, so we had to act exaggeratedly thankful. I think we got slightly fewer pies on average, but from then on we couldn’t scoff them upstairs but had to make a show, sharing dessert with Mother in the kitchen and agreeing about how cinnamon with blueberry was a nice touch.

  We may have had them less often, but the slices were gigantic and the scene was always tense. So tense you really had to wonder why she kept rolling them out.’

  ‘Now, however,’ I said, ‘no more coconut custard. You can eat cereal and chicken and rice and grapefruit and your diet is impeccable.’

  Truman stared at his hands as if they had just wrapped around someone’s neck. His chest shuddered, and lay still. ‘I raked the 53

  yard. I vacuumed. I cleared pine needles from the gutters and installed new pipes in the upstairs bath. I’d do anything but sit down with her for a cup of coffee, and that was all she wanted, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Truman—’

  He looked up. ‘She cried, Corlis. All the time. She’d wrap her arms
around me and her fingers clawed into me like—talons. She’d soak my shoulder so that I’d have to change my shirt. Those weird—shot-gun—sobs…And I didn’t feel any sympathy, Corlis. I wanted to hit her.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Any normal son with a heart.’

  ‘Truman, I wouldn’t even come home for Christmas.’

  ‘I didn’t blame you!’ He started to pace. ‘You know, I trained her—even before we got married—not to come to the dovecot.’

  ‘As I recall, the big accomplishment was to get her to knock.’

  ‘Right. Twenty-one years old, and she’d waltz straight into my room as if I were still in my cot.’

  At another time—as I had for so many years that it ceased to make Truman angry and simply bored him—I’d have suggested that if he didn’t want his mother walking in unannounced the answer wasn’t to

  ‘train her’ but to move out.

  ‘So we had that confrontation. After which—theatrically—she’d knock. This turned out to be important, since there were some mornings I had to stuff Averil up the spiral staircase to hide on the tower deck.’

  He was worked up, but couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘In winter it was freezing,’ Averil recalled fondly. ‘The neighbours must have wondered, a naked woman on the top of your house. And Truman would scurry around hiding my clothes under the sheet and she’d come in and start to make the bed…’

  I had heard these favourite stories before.

  ‘Right, well, sanctified by marriage,’ said Truman, ‘we got a little privacy, OK? Dinner upstairs except on Sundays, and we had our own life. After Father died that went to hell. She’d knock, three timid taps, but never waited to be invited, and crept up the stairs calling my name in that kiddie voice, Twooo-maaannn! Some days we hid. Some days we both chattered on the tower deck.

  ‘Well, last spring she came up again and it was time for grapefruit and I wanted to slip the bourbon from under my sandbag and have our nightcap and finish talking about—’

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  ‘Mother,’ I provided.

  ‘Of course. We stood around the kitchen and gave her yes and no answers to every question and folded our arms and looked at the ceiling and wouldn’t even ask her to sit down in the living room—didn’t offer her coffee, didn’t ask her about the hospice—but does she get the message? NO! So after half an hour, right, after all those hugs and pats on the arm I couldn’t control myself. Gosh, Mother! I exploded. You can’t be mean enough!’

  Truman sat down with a thud. ‘Well, you know how her voice was always fake? Cheery and falsetto? I’ll never forget hearing it change. It sank a full octave lower. It wasn’t nasal any more. All the muscles in her face dropped. No, you’ve done a pretty good job, she said, and her posture became totally straight with her shoulders squared and she walked calmly down the stairs. That was her real voice. I’d never heard my own mother’s real voice before. Amazing. It was almost worth it,’

  Truman added. ‘But not quite.’

  ‘So sometimes,’ I noted, ‘you did hit her.’

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  5

  ‘I thought about Mordecai’s false dilemma,’ Truman admitted as we squealed on the porch swing late the next afternoon. ‘I might pay $10,000

  for a night with Mother and Father, as long as it were different.’

  ‘Maybe that was his point,’ I said, toeing the swing in a figure eight.

  ‘That it couldn’t have been different. Therefore, inexorably, if Mother appeared in your dovecot from beyond the grave, in five minutes you’d be fretting for her to leave you alone. That’s the way it was, so that’s the way it was.’ A tautology, but I was groping.

  ‘What do you think was wrong?’

  ‘Mother was miserable.’

  ‘Yes, for the last two years—’

  ‘Long before that.’

  ‘And Father never noticed?’

  ‘Come on. Mother was the one who never noticed.’

  I reported a remark she’d made to me when I was twelve, making my mother only forty. Rather out of nowhere, she informed me in the same buoyant, bouncy tone she’d used for reading aloud The Man with the Yellow Hat, ‘The best of my life is over, of course. I’d be glad to die now, except that would be selfish. I have to think of the family.’

  ‘What she was saying,’ I told Truman, ‘was she wished she were dead. And this from the happiest woman in the world, according to herself. She thought it a common enough sentiment and went on to propose we have Spanish noodles for dinner.’

  ‘Don’t that beat all,’ said Truman.

  Like my brothers, I, too, had tried all my life to get away from my parents, the underpinning assumption that of course I couldn’t get away or I’d not have gone to such extravagant

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  lengths as putting the entire Atlantic Ocean between us. The two deaths, one on the other, had therefore arrived with a dumb surprise. Behold, it was more than possible to flee their company; in the end they fled mine.

  Truman and I had talked plenty about my parents and we weren’t through. A brother is a gift this way, since no one else would tolerate our interminable dissection for five minutes. Claustrophobically as I might yearn to chat about something else, should we stray to other matters conversation sagged and I was inevitably lured back. Talk of my parents was like candy we couldn’t resist but which made us sick.

  It was as if we were trying to solve a puzzle, like the Independent crossword. Yet Andrew and I had never done anything with our filled-in crosswords but throw them away. Therefore my question was less whether my mother, feeling excluded, tried regularly to divide me from my brothers than to what conceivable use I might put this information.

  I suggested we go for a walk (for Truman, that always meant the same walk); he objected that he walked after dinner and I kicked him.

  He grumbled and said all right he’d fetch Averil and I pleaded please don’t. ‘She’ll feel left out!’ he objected.

  ‘Sometimes people are left out,’ I said, picturing my mother’s eyes hood and smoulder while Truman and I conducted whole conversations in a language we had invented. ‘So there’s nothing wrong with their feeling that way.’

  I grabbed a muffler and jittered on the front porch as Truman applied for permission upstairs. At last he emerged, alone but harried. One walk had cost him.

  ‘What’s the big deal?’ I asked as we tripped down the stoop. ‘For Christ’s sake, I’m your sister.’

  ‘You’re not married,’ he said. ‘Filling out course registrations can be a big deal. If Averil can get jealous of a pencil, she can certainly manage it with a whole sister.’

  I swished through the curling leaves of the black walnut tree.

  He side-eyed me. ‘You’re looking pretty good.’

  ‘Thanks. The last two weeks, I lost some weight.’

  ‘Suits.’

  I biffed him lightly on the upper arm, solid as a firm mattress. ‘You, too. Not bad.’ It was a service we did one another, mutual confirmation that neither of us was falling apart.

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  As we cornered Blount Street to North, I glanced back at Heck-Andrews; gold light retouched the manila clapboard so it no longer seemed to need painting. Massive for a residence, it was dwarfed by the Bath Building rising behind it, a great white slab for the NC State Laboratory of Public Health. The steady roar of its circulation system Truman claimed to detest, but I’m sure he was used to the noise. It was the hulk of concrete itself he reviled. Erected in 1987, the Bath Building destroyed the view from our back porch, once of an open field used for landing the governor’s helicopter. The field was now circumscribed by a mall of polished granite office buildings, and children could no longer play Army there—a game my father had discouraged, and which had therefore been our favourite.

  As we strode down Wilmington Street, my eyes swivelled from the Mall on our left to Oakwood on our right. It had taken me years of absence to notice that our neighbourhood was bizarre.
Smack in the middle of downtown Raleigh, our Reconstruction enclave might easily be mistaken for a state theme park; add a gruesome dental surgery, a pretty girl pretending to churn butter, and an over-priced beeswax candle factory and I think we’d have got away with charging tourists admission. The houses were all Colonial Revivals and Second Empires, with storm cellars, boarded-up outhouses, and a proliferation of chimneys; happy darkies hauling water from a hand pump would not have looked remotely out of place. The grand, leisurely scale of these dwellings had been made possible by the Civil War, which had ravaged and levelled so many homes around the capitol. Carpetbagging architects had poured down from the north, for land was cheap, pine plentiful, and labour, with freed slaves and veterans equally unemployed, eager to pound clapboard for a meal a day. The yards were grand, their hardwoods grown as lush and steady as their planters intended.

  What Oakwood’s architects would not have anticipated was the New South on our left: a faceless array of stoic government granite indistinguishable from dozens of other downtowns north and south. This was the land of Internet and sun-dried tomatoes, no longer butt of barefoot bumpkin jokes, but the most rapidly expanding regional economy of the country, whose Research Triangle labs and industrial facilities drew scientists and magnates from all over the States. I cannot explain it, but none of this

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  new-found sophistication stanched my horror when I slipped and said that’s real nahce or stopped me from lying to Londoners that I was born in New York.

  ‘Do you ever regret not studying architecture?’ I asked my brother.

  ‘Oh, not really.’ He sighed. ‘I’d have been expected to design modern buildings, wouldn’t I? I only like the old ones. The last thing I’d want would be to goon up at the Bath Building and realize it’s partly my fault.’

  ‘You and Prince Charles,’ I said. ‘Ever miss the hardware truck?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Often.’

  After high school, Truman went through a ‘phase’—according to my father. Surely daunted by Sturges McCrea’s professional eminence and degree from Harvard Law, Truman decided to be, as he put it, ‘regular’.