A Perfectly Good Family
A Perfectly Good Family
Lionel Shriver
Following the success of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and ‘The Post-Birthday World’, ‘A Perfectly Good Family’ is coming back into print after being unavailable for years.After having escaped for years to London, Corlis McCrea returns to the grand Reconstruction mansion where she grew up in North Carolina, now willed to the three grown children following the death of their parents. All three want the house.Fiscal necessity dictates that two must buy a third out. Just as she was torn as a girl, the sister must choose between her decent younger brother and the renegade eldest—the black sheep who covets his legacy in order to destroy it. The adult siblings re-enact the deep enmities and loyalties of childhood, as each bids for a bigger slice of the pie.
Copyright (#ud4ac319c-efa5-510d-893a-df914bb12a31)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 1996
Copyright © Lionel Shriver 1996
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com)
Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007578023
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007301744
Version: 2015-08-20
Dedication (#ud4ac319c-efa5-510d-893a-df914bb12a31)
TO DON AND PEGGY SHRIVER
from whom, on balance, I have inherited more strengths than foibles—the most parents could hope for any child
A son could bear complacently the death of his father, while the loss of inheritance might drive him to despair.
Machiavelli, The Prince
Table of Contents
Cover (#ucee0f9d1-2ddf-59c8-8f7a-04ae84cd308b)
Title Page (#u6a1607e2-d457-5071-ae58-7464df275c36)
Copyright (#u836253a3-6ae6-568d-9f84-77dde2e4b811)
Dedication (#u44579791-adb3-5548-90e1-3e5c4e88a0ce)
Epigraph (#u8251c0c1-6845-5a6e-b192-eda4177d700e)
chapter one (#uc35e8d19-4986-5562-a681-0ef9b7cf83a7)
chapter two (#u0a2b2f87-8aa7-502c-8966-97f9d718969f)
chapter three (#ua302d864-0488-5cd1-8a2d-62b169e41b02)
chapter four (#ue58d6660-1071-53e5-ad0b-533d3a614b83)
chapter five (#u247fe771-8c18-5796-9333-3f454e93c7ec)
chapter six (#ue96393c6-6b37-5acc-b798-32ba3b18414b)
chapter seven (#u5d2eadc3-fc15-536b-b37d-bc2f139dd7eb)
chapter eight (#udeb86c45-258b-57b9-b09a-51f5d06355bb)
chapter nine (#u261fc7fb-7d1a-5ed2-8115-a708449b3962)
chapter ten (#uac0271bb-c6f7-5480-a29d-c144bf46b904)
chapter eleven (#u25f32743-8bfe-5922-b6f1-9e09d14b6cc1)
chapter twelve (#u294f916d-c396-55ba-8871-c4994d7d1b88)
chapter thirteen (#u5164b386-7610-55a6-8f01-d1ca6eec8afa)
chapter fourteen (#u1a57e9bd-d3b2-5770-be66-b2157e23f531)
chapter fifteen (#ub109448a-532d-508c-be5d-4ce827c5be22)
chapter sixteen (#u69a22a00-b5c6-5964-9f21-e3089a798ff2)
chapter seventeen (#uf411865e-53b2-5337-9443-22f9a7d0dede)
chapter eighteen (#u7b59f6f7-0452-5fb3-9b3b-57031d395a9a)
chapter nineteen (#u1d1adf36-390e-5872-9c71-6c7bbd3391bb)
chapter twenty (#u770f230d-399c-5f33-83b6-1756277057ba)
About the book (#ubc1be8d1-72af-57b4-af9f-ed730a69fdf3)
Praise for A Perfectly Good Family (#u54d532ce-4c15-57e7-91a4-72b030c11580)
About the Author (#u7ba74a89-1093-552a-bb1d-8a7dacb3ebe7)
Also by Lionel Shriver (#u7c657221-3960-5f9d-ae57-be728183cb56)
About the Publisher (#uf1be582f-1cb3-544b-938f-2e079621a35c)
chapter one (#ud4ac319c-efa5-510d-893a-df914bb12a31)
Don’t tell me,” said the taxi driver, rubber-necking at the formidable Victorian manor. “Your mother’s Norman Bates.”
“My mother’s dead,” I said. Harsh, but the information was so fresh for me, only two weeks old, that I was still repeating it to myself.
“Don’t you strain yourself, Missy.” He lunged from the front seat to take the luggage from me: two leather monsters and a bulging carry-on. I’d been overweight at Heathrow, and lucky that in November the plane was not too full.
“You want, I’ll haul these to the porch—”
“Not at all,” I said. “My brother likes to give me a hand. He always has.”
I pulled out a wad of dollars crumpled with fivers, unsure of the form for tipping taxis in North Carolina. An ostensible native, I clung to any ignorance about Raleigh as proof that I no longer belonged here. Skint most of my adult life, I reminded myself I would have more money soon and forced myself to hand over twenty percent. The generosity didn’t come naturally. McCreas are Scots-Presbyterian stock; I have stingy genes.
“But you’re spot on about the house,” I nodded upwards. “It does look like Psycho, all right. The neighborhood children all think it’s haunted.”
And wasn’t it? Handing over the bills, I thumbed Alexander Hamilton; after five years of starchy London tenners, a dollar felt like pyjamas.
“Or The Addams Family, mehbe. Take care now, ma’am. Hope your brother’s a muscly guy. Those cases is killers.”
“He’s pretty powerful.” I frowned. Since I still envisaged Truman as a delicate, timid tag-along about two feet high, that he was a beefy man of thirty-one who lifted weights in his attic living room was disconcerting.
The cab plowed down Blount Street, leaving me by chattel that would have been, until a fortnight before, all I owned. I turned to face what else I owned: a great, gaunt mansion built just after the Civil War.
There was no denying its magnificence. I had shown friends in London pictures of my family: my dark, glamorously beautiful mother in the days when she was genuinely happy instead of pretending to be; my father sporting his lopsided, hangdog grin as he accepted another award from the NAACP; my little brother Truman when he was photographed by the Raleigh Times throwing himself in front of a bulldozer; though I had no pictures, I discovered, of my older brother. None of these snaps made the slightest impression. Yet when I showed them a picture of my house, faces lit, hands clapped, eyebrows lifted. For the English, Heck-Andrews was everything a Southern residence was meant to be: remote, anachronistic, both inviting and forbidding at the same time. It fulfilled their tritest expectations, though I received complaints that there was no Spanish moss. That’s in South Carolina, I’d explain. And then we would get on to why I didn’t seem to have a Southern accent, and I’d be reassured that tell-tale traces had been eradicated.
Even in the last light of the day I could see the clapboard was flaking; so the failing manila paint was now my problem. It was apparent from the pavement that the ceilings of the first two floors were vaulting, all very exhilarating except they were murderously dear to heat, and the price of oil was now, I supposed, my problem as well. Yet paint and heat were only a third my responsibility—and this in itself would shortly become my biggest problem.
It was the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, a holiday which I only ever remembered in Raleigh-Durham, where gift shops were flogging pop-up pilgrim books; letting this exclusively American holiday nearly slip by unnoticed gave me a sense of accomplishment. I zipped up my jacket. No doubt the English didn’t picture the South in winter, but North Carolina has one, albeit mild. In fact, I remembered dressing for school huddled by the floor vent, stuffing my bunched knee-highs by its breath to pre-warm my socks. My parents were McCreas, too, and their remedy to the heating problem was all too simple.
I left the bags on the pavement and strode toward the broad, intricately ornamented front porch that skirted the mansion. This opulent, gregarious-looking expanse with a swing on one end was designed for mint juleps; but my parents had been teetotalers and, rather than recall long languid summer nights with fireflies and low laughter, I pictured squeaking morosely with Truman on the swing, frantic for my parents to go to bed. We hadn’t been very nice to them. Ordinarily on one of my visits home as I approached this same front door I’d be bracing myself for my mother’s protracted, claim-laying embrace—when the more I stiffened, the harder she would squeeze. Once my father died, her hugs had become only longer and tighter and were laced with hysteria. Now I was spared. A dubious reprieve.
We rarely entered through the front door, more comfortable with the side entrance into the kitchen. Ringing the bell, I touched the cold curlicued polygonal panes in the door, one of which had been replaced with plain window glass. The asymmetry never failed to vex Truman. But because the original had been shattered when my older brother put his arm through it—my father had been chasing him through the house to force him to turn down the volume of Three Dog Night—I treasured the flaw. There weren’t many signs of Mordecai left here.
“Corlis!”
In the open door my brother hugged me. He knew how: his hands were firm on my back and he waited a single beat during which he was plausibly thinking about being glad to see me and then he let go. I didn’t take these capacities for granted.
“You should have let us pick you up.”
“Not during rush hour.” The consideration was unlike me. When I gestured to my luggage on the pavement, I thought I was doing Truman a favor by allowing him to heave it in.
“What have you got in these things, a dead body?”
“You might say that.”
“I thought you were only here for a few days.” He muttered, “Girls!” with a smile.
I watched my little brother. He was broad, though to say stocky would suggest fat, which he was not. He liked carrying suitcases because he was a practical person and enjoyed putting his muscles to more beneficial use than for sandbagged press-ups. His face, too, was wide, though in my mind’s eye it remained insubstantial. Likewise, his hair had coarsened and curled; though we were both born blonds, our driving licenses now would read, “Hair: brown.” Yet I refused to relinquish the notion that my brother’s mop was bright gold, a cowlick sprouting from his parting with the spontaneous whimsy of Truman’s childhood, of which there was, in fact, little remnant.
My vision was so corrupted that if I blinked, he no longer sported a close-cropped beard. They don’t make corrective lenses for people unable to focus on the present tense, so that this myopia of mine would soon have me banging into things all over our house which were there now and not in the past—like my brother’s hair-trigger temper. While Truman McCrea as an adult was depressive and given to bilious explosions, I would continue to treat him carelessly, as if he remained the ingenuous, piping, cooperative boy who would do whatever I told him with unfailing trustfulness. He was still, God help him, trusting.
I nudged the cases past the transom and clumped the door shut, rubbing my hands. With Truman controlling the thermostat it was warm in the foyer. Inside Heck-Andrews, with its seasoned oak floor and mahogany paneling absorbing the late sun, evening had arrived. The lamps were lit and for a moment I was taken in: that this was the enclosed, safe, self-contained haven that other people called home. Leering back at me from the facing staircase were the gargoyles on whose pointed ears I’d impaled my crotch as a girl when sliding down the black walnut banisters. It was amazing I could still have children—though not for many years longer.
“Hey, there,” said Averil shyly, hanging back.
I kissed my sister-in-law diffidently, on both cheeks, and stood back to appraise her. There was no reason why Averil should not have been pretty. Her hair was brown as well, but lustrous, while our own was embittered by the memory of its former golden glory and ate the light. She cut hers shoulder length and the locks coiled, turning to her ears as if also shy. She was medium height, though maybe that was the trouble: too much of her was simply medium. Nourished by my brother’s obsessively perfect diet, her figure was trim, though her sway-backed posture was pre-pubescent. Her nose was upturned, expectant, and her eyes were enormous with bashful long lashes, and when they turned to my brother they widened still further, coloring with big brown awe. She adored him. Averil, too, was far older than I pictured her—twenty-eight. I thought: she is nicely proportioned and really ought to be lovely, though I did not think: maybe she is lovely.
I nodded at the stand in the hall. “It’s still there.”
“Yep,” said Truman, pressing his lips like my mother.
Mother’s pocketbook always rested on this doorside table, where it continued to rest, clasped, reposed like a body in a casket. I knew what was inside: a tin of Sucrets gone sticky, the medicine she didn’t take for her heart, and a vast crumple of multi-ply re-used Kleenex pressed with pink lipstick. When we sniffled in church, she would hand us a damp tatter; repelled, we’d snort the mucus down our throats.
“You should cancel the credit cards,” I advised.
I delivered duties to my brother as privileges. For the funeral ten days earlier, I had allowed him to buy the cold cuts and to ring her colleagues at the hospice. This was the kind of graciousness in which I specialized.
We drifted to the formal parlor, though traditionally we’d have preferred the sitting room opposite, a less pompous environment with the TV and torn Naugahyde sofas that was comfortably messy. Some solemnity had entered these proceedings which I didn’t know how to kick. I felt polite.
“My whole life,” said Truman, in his minor key, “I’ve been taught not to go into Mother’s purse without asking. Pawing through her wallet doesn’t come easily.”
Truman fetched us glasses of wine, and I scanned the parlor, no longer milling with Raleigh’s community leaders, hands on my shoulder assuring me what a good woman my mother had been, how deeply committed my father had been to civil rights, and all the while me squirming at their touch, not feeling flattered even on my parents’ account and hoping that when I died no one called me “good”—though considering what I had just left behind me in London, there was little danger of that.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do with all this junk,” said Averil.
At least she was candid. However laborious the task of cluttering such vast floor space, my parents had undertaken the chore with some success. With no less than twenty-four rooms in this house, it was substantially over-furnished. The parlor, for example, was fat with low-riding Danish modern. If Truman is to be believed, my parents did not understand (I would say, did not even like) their own house, and were always fighting its retrograde nature and trying to haul it wholesale into the twentieth century, where, according to Truman, Heck-Andrews not only did not belong but refused to go. Thus none of their “improvements” would take—when my father repapered the upstairs hall with purple peonies, the panels curled to the baseboards that same night. When they splurged on shag for the sitting room, none of the carpet tacks would stay in the floor. I claimed their additions didn’t adhere because my father was a do-it-yourself incompetent—his glue was too thin and he used the wrong nails. Truman, one of the last great anthropomorphizers, was convinced that the house itself had revolted, moulting loud wallpaper and shuddering tatty shag from her boards.
As for the “junk” of which Averil despaired, my parents had been avid travelers, favoring countries with anguishing social ailments: South Africa, Burma, Korea, where they would meet with pastors just out of prison, dissidents running underground presses, and Amnesty International task forces. Somewhere in all that hand-wringing over human rights they’d found time to shop, for this room was busy with been-to bric-a-brac: Namibian carvings, Korean celadon, hand-painted Russian dolls, while the walls were smattered with a mismatch of Japanese sumi birdlife, Indonesian batiks and Masai ceremonial masks.
“I suppose we can help ourselves,” I said. “Like a boot sale at the end of the day, and everything’s free.”
“I wish they’d taken this stuff with them,” said Truman glumly.
“The house, too?” I proposed. “Like Carrie.”
He glared. “How was the opening? Of your show?”
I sculpt. I had flown back to Heathrow after my mother’s funeral to attend my first big break, a one-woman show at a decent London gallery. My mother had been so pleased for me when she heard about it that I didn’t think she’d want me to miss my limelight to moon around this house deciding who got her crockery. Truman had been annoyed by my departure, but no life outside this house was real to him; other cities—Raleigh itself, come to think of it—were names in the air. And I’d done as I promised: I’d come back to haggle over our inheritance.
“It was smashing,” I said.
Coy, but with catastrophes you have to salvage something, if only the odd wisecrack.
My wine had evaporated; I was nervous. I pinged for more, to discover there wasn’t much difference between drinking around my mother and drinking around my younger brother. They both eyed your glass and kept a running count. I often wondered what it was Mother thought I might do or say when I became so fearfully uninhibited. Once she’d become sufficiently alarmed—after two glasses—my bottle would get whisked off and corked, so to slake my thirst I would have to scrounge for my good cabernet hidden gauchely in the back of the fridge. This was subtle strategy. Once we were adults, she couldn’t forbid booze exactly, but she made you go public with how you couldn’t make it through an ordinary evening with your family without drink. She was right. I couldn’t.
I leaned forward and traced the ceramic basketry of a bulbous celadon vase on the coffee table. I worked with clay myself, and had to admire the craftsmanship of its intricate crosshatching, though the aura of the object was cool. If the serene sea-green vase had any thematic content, it was self-congratulation: wasn’t-this-difficult-to-make. It was a gift from a grateful Korean graduate student with wayward political views, whom my father had smuggled into NC State out of Seoul. My parents had been so proud of this thing and it meant nothing to me and now it was mine.
Like my father, Truman couldn’t keep his hands still, but sprang them against each other or twisted his wedding band and then kneaded the back of his neck as if trying to give himself a massage.
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 marvelous, 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 parlor 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 colored 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 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 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.
chapter two (#ud4ac319c-efa5-510d-893a-df914bb12a31)
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 aerie 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 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 Hermann 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.
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 inquired. “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 favorite word—just as 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 independent 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 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 humor, 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.
Here in the middle room he’d laid their hefty darkwood table, solidly built and lovingly refinished. They don’t make things the waythey used to—if you listened to Truman from around a corner you might mistake him for his grandfather, except that my father’s father was not the least bit sentimental about the olden days, was grateful for central heating, and had recently installed his own fax.
We dined on grilled skinned chicken thighs, a mound of rice fluffy with a scant tablespoon of butter and steamed broccoli. I had shared this meal before, and variations followed similar nutritional lines. If I asked my little brother what he believed, leaving aside his convictions about architecture which were equally fanatical, his leading catechism would underscore that carbohydrates must be relied upon for caloric mainstay; in place of deity he would exalt dietary fiber. Amid the malign influences in Truman’s universe, fat ranked first. He might not have gone so far as to call obese people evil themselves, but they were at least the devil’s playground. While my father had got worked up over a black woman dying because she was not admitted to white Rex hospital, his second son only displayed similar choler when a documentary asserted that some people were born fat and couldn’t help it. The worst of determinism, in Truman’s mind.
I shouldn’t complain; if the food was plain it was impeccably prepared—six and a half minutes per thigh side on the second notch down on the grill, one cup rice to one-and-a-third cups water less one tablespoon. Truman was precise, and, in spite of his highfalutin’ and ham-handed father, my brother’s worldview was essentially mechanical.
“Before we meet with the lawyer tomorrow,” Truman mentioned, and swallowed, “I thought you and I might talk about—” when he dabbed his mouth casually, his hand trembled “—the house.”
“What about it?”
“Mordecai’s going to want his share in cash.”
“Probably.”
“He’s a philistine. But what about you?”
We would not hear the details of the will until the following afternoon, but my parents had prepared us for their estate being evenly divided among the three heirs. They must have been sorely tempted to disinherit the eldest altogether, but their idea of themselves as fair liberal parents who did not have preferences among their children won the day.
“Have you a clue how much dosh is left—”
“Dosh?” Truman’s eyes narrowed.
“Money. On top of the house?”
“Nope. With the dosh I saw Father mailing off to every Negro-something charity he could find I bet we’re not coming into a windfall. Still, Father’s salary from the Supreme Court must have accumulated to something. If my share of the cash is enough, I’d be willing to buy both you and Mordecai out.”
“Uh-huh.” I picked a tendon from my teeth. “Since Oakwood has gentrified, this place has appreciated by a factor of several times. I doubt you’ll have the resources.” I found myself hoping that he would not. “What’s Plan B?”
“Well, you and I could buy Mordecai out together,” said Truman promptly.
“Uh-huh.”
“And then, little by little, after I finish my degree and get a job, I could pay you off and eventually you’d get your money, I promise. We could even draw up a contract, with some moderate interest …”
“Uh-huh.” I folded my arms. “In any case, you want to be the one who owns Heck-Andrews. At the end of the day.”
“Well.” He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“But it’s my house, too.”
“In a way.”
“Not in a way. Legally, emotionally, historically—I grew up here, they were my parents as well, and it is partly my house.”
“Okay!” He backed off, but he still didn’t appear to accept that I had, much less Mordecai had, any legitimate claim on what he had already, our mother two weeks dead, assumed as his own property. “The main thing is, we should try and keep it in the family. The last thing we want is to have to sell. Right?”
I didn’t answer.
“Right, Corlis?” He was panicking.
It’s chilling how clinical one can be in the midst of grief, but I had given this matter some thought. I did figure Mordecai would want the money, that Truman wouldn’t come into enough liquid assets to buy us both out, and I could conceivably force the house on to the market. Just as Truman’s impulse with Mordecai and the Britannicas was to deny him the prize, I was tempted to take Heck-Andrews from Truman precisely because it was the one possession he most desired.
“I might go in with you.” I tapped my fork on the table. “But not with the understanding that you eventually buy my share. If I’m going to have a half-interest in this property, I’m going to stay interested.”
Truman looked mystified, and paused in his hoovering of rice. “Why? You live in London.”
Averil mumbled, “Ask her why she brought six pairs of jeans.”
“Don’t you?” he pressed.
“And why she packed shorts. And summer dresses. In November.” Averil was talking to her plate.
I tossed my balled napkin at my chicken bones. “As of today I live in Raleigh.”
I’d fled this town with such desperation that the statement wallowed in my ears with sickening fatalism. The Myth of the Eternal Return: there was no getting away, was there? I felt like one of those paddle balls on an elastic string; the further I bounced away, the harder I would land smack back on my staple.
“Where in Raleigh?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ve been evicted. For now, this is the only place I have to go.”
My brother’s jaw jutted forward, like my father’s. “Don’t you think you might have asked?”
“Asked? Unless Hugh appoints us otherwise tomorrow, I just inherited a third of this place. Why would I need your permission to live in my own house?”
Averil had started clearing the table, pitching silverware on to stacked plates from inches above, crash-crash; then she made quite a project out of bunching all the napkins into a single, furiously tight wad.
“Because other people live in it,” said Truman.
“If this place is so massive,” I reminded him, “that Father wanted to donate half of it to the homeless, it’s obviously big enough for you and me.”
“But I thought you had this great career going. That you had a gallery and you were going to be famous and you’d made your real life in Britain. All that about applying to British immigration for ‘settlement’ … How you liked your new flatmates … And a sidewalk seems like a pavement now.”
“You mean you thought you’d got rid of me.”
“I didn’t—”
It happened again, up-side of the head: I was starting to cry. Averil shot me a quick dirty look, as if tears were cheating. As punishment, she cleared my wine glass.
“What did you mean,” Truman prodded, “you’ve been ‘evicted’?”
When I found the spacious flat in South Ealing I was patching together a living from bootlegging films off the BBC for third-world black-market videos, and part-time messengering in town on a gasping second-hand scooter. At thirty-four, I was wearying of odd jobs and empty pockets for the sake of “my work,” and my attitude toward my higher calling had grown sardonic. However, I’d had just enough encouragement from selling the odd piece privately that I hadn’t, incredibly, given up. The pretension of being an Artist may have made me cringe, and at low-rent parties I never introduced myself as anything but a bohemian ex-pat scavenger. Still, alone with mud, refining a plane or tapering those delicate fingers, I did not want a drink, a fag, a nap, or a chat; sculpting was the single thing I did that was all I wanted to be doing while I was doing it.
What’s more, I savored that my income was illegal. From girlhood I had been a sneak. For four years I’d limped by on tourist or student visas and wasn’t officially allowed to work; I was in my element under the table.
So after I’d made a hash of one more live-in relationship, I may have wished myself beyond the stage of communitarian arrangements with names on milk cartons, but I could not afford a flat on my own, full stop. I posted for flatmates at universities. I knew it was safer—and wouldn’t it have been—to advertise for females, but girls bored me and I grew up flanked by boys.
I had several takers, so I must have selected the winning couple with some care. I don’t know what system I applied—the two men were not in the least alike.
Andrew Finlay was a grad student in political science at the London School of Economics, a scrawny bookish-looking boy with sharp shoulders and tapered wrists. His body was knobby and perverse, with a prominent Adam’s apple and double joints—his elbows bent backwards. Though twenty-four, he looked twelve, an effect he encouraged by wearing outsized overalls bibbing harlequin jumpers, trouser cuffs rolled high to expose rumpled socks and chunky shoes. His facial features were narrow and weaselly, dwarfed by wide National Health horn-rims. Though his grin was sly and he laughed knowingly from the side of his mouth, it didn’t take long to ferret out that Andrew had had meager experience with women.
Peter Larson was a broader man, still well my junior but older than Andrew by six years. He was a Glaswegian, and it took me weeks of deciphering his accent to understand that his ostensible ambitions were in journalism. Such a future was hard to picture, save the bit about boozing up sources at late-license pubs. Peter was on the hapless side, as he cheerfully admitted. He subbed for the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard for a month at a time, but often lost the job for mitching his morning slot, hung over. He was frequently late with his rent, but it was hard to get angry with him; that Peter was unreliable was at the heart of his appeal. While Andrew’s jokes were contrived around esoteric puns or the latest cabinet scandal, Peter’s humor was bawdy, his laughter salacious and inclusive. Besides, he was handsome, a footballer only recently gone to seed, with a square jaw and strong stomach muscles that would bear up under years’ more abuse. I knew how he’d end up: a potbellied, pasty would-have-been blustering through tall tales to avoid paying his round, but foresight inspired me to make the most of his company before he declined to welcher and nuisance.
Since Peter would vanish for days on end, on benders or fast-burn romances he’d never say, I spent a lot more time with Andrew. The younger man was light enough to share my scooter, on which the two of us would top-heavily weave to Stop ’n’ Shop for provisions, to return flapping with plastic bags. His hands resting deftly on my hips sent a warm glow up the back of my neck. Though I might have dismounted grateful to have made it home without capsizing, I’d feel doleful when our mission was accomplished, already chafing to run out of Marmite—his favorite late snack with cold, burnt toast.
An atavistic socialist and paid-up member of Greenpeace, Andrew would wag his slender double-jointed fingers by the hour, lecturing on the betrayals of the Labour Party; I only half-listened. Our more frolicsome times were spent hunched over sticky oilcloth at the kitchen table, where he taught me the conventions of British crossword puzzles. The Independent’s clues were oblique in comparison with the Herald Tribune’s, a distinction which would tempt Andrew to extemporize on how Americans had no sense of irony. I’d retort that the British were self-regarding and coy. Andrew hailed from Bath; his ls converted to ws, his ths to fs and vs. I’d mimic his reading of clues—“Boat of bwuverwy wuv”; he’d caricature my inattentive lapses into a southern accent—“Keeyun-sheeyup.”
I liked to think it inevitable that, as we haggled over 19 across, his hand would eventually drop the pen for mine.
I liked to think it equally inevitable that, on a later night, Andrew off to bed, Peter would burst into the flat when I was only wearing a kimono, let the cup of coffee I fixed him cool as he poured the last of his White Horse for me, until at 4 a.m. the flaps of my kimono would fall open.
Improbably, this went on for months. I counseled each of them in turn that to keep our household amicable it was paramount they neither blurted to the other about any indiscreet flat-mating. Though the two had little in common, they liked each other, and agreed. Andrew said he could see how Peter might feel left out; Peter said, that poor lad’s not getting any crumpet, no reason to shove our sheets under his nose. I doubt two women would have been capable of it, but judging from the ease and hilarity of that period those chaps must have kept their traps shut.
About that time I feel wistful, though I know I shouldn’t—playing double-footsie under the oilcloth; rushing to throw on my jeans when Andrew and I heard a key in the door; pretending wakefulness so that Andrew would lumber off to bed before Peter stumbled jovially in after last call. I knew our trio couldn’t last, but somehow neither man encroached emotionally on the other in my head. Peter was rambunctious and liked to wrestle; he spent no time analysing “our relationship” and he still didn’t tell me where he went on holidays from our flat. Peter would slam-bam; Andrew was tender, solicitous and adventurous in bed. While Peter was oblivious to the crudest details of my existence, Andrew made meticulous inquiry into my past and grilled me on whether I wanted to have children.
Although I’d never have expected appreciation, from Peter in particular, they both adored my sculpture. I fashioned and fired my pieces at a ceramics cooperative in Clapham, but bubble-wrapped them back to the flat, where I unveiled them to my fans in our spare room, to gratifying oohs and ahs.
Good news seems always paired with bad. A fortnight after the three of us had polished off four bottles of champagne to celebrate my coup with the Curlew Gallery, the phone rang again. It wasn’t the middle of the night, which might have prepared me. Truman was admirably factual. He had found my mother in our parlor at ten in the morning, surrounded by old photos of my father. Undoubtedly, her heart.
Both boys were terribly sweet. Andrew got right on the phone to BA, and I hadn’t known there were special rates for emergency bereavements—I got on a flight at half price the next day. He fixed me tea while Peter, predictably, ran for vodka. They both saw me off at Heathrow, while I assured them I’d be back in a few days; I had to put up my show at the Curlew when I returned. Take care of my darlings in the spare room, I said, and kissed each of them, daringly, on the mouth.
They may not have been gossipy girls, but if you put two people of any sex in a room by themselves for long enough they will tell all.
I’d been flirting,” I told Truman, “with both of them. I guess while I was gone they had a few beers with each other, and … well, they must have been mad.”
“So they kicked you out.”
“That’s not all they kicked. Or one of them. When I flew back, no one met my plane. I took the tube, and came home to the flat empty. I was restless, and headed for the back room thinking I could start swathing my pieces in bubble-wrap for transport to the Curlew …” I sighed.
“The hand,” twigged Averil.
“Oh, nobody had taken a pickax to them. I might have preferred that. No, all the hands were lopped off. Every one.”
“Couldn’t you glue them back?”
“Not for a tony London gallery, and the breaks weren’t clean. No, the sculptures were ruined all right. Three, four years’ work at least. I’m back to Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.”
“I find it hard to believe,” said Truman, “that those guys would destroy all that work for flirting.”
It’s true that I sanitize my stories for Truman, but like his mother he’s so gruelingly good.
“You said it was only one of them,” said Averil. “Which?”
“I was surprised. Peter was given to drunken rampages. Andrew was the sensitive, cerebral one. Then, I don’t think Peter would have cared so much. He was savvy, he was wild and casual and had other women. Andrew …”
“Was in love,” said Averil.
“Maybe,” I conceded. “I hadn’t noticed. I probably didn’t want to.”
That night, my spindly lover had returned, having given me just enough time to discover his get-out-of-my-life present. Behind the glare of his horn-rims, his eyes were anthracite. For once, he did look knowing.
“Why the hands?” pressed Averil.
“Because my hands,” I said, “had lied. But they hadn’t really. I liked each of those men. I liked each of them, in a different way, a great deal.”
Whenever my father was asked if he wanted pie or ice cream he would smirk and say he wanted pie with ice cream, so I was raised with the idea I could have both.
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Lionel Shriver
Following the success of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and ‘The Post-Birthday World’, ‘A Perfectly Good Family’ is coming back into print after being unavailable for years.After having escaped for years to London, Corlis McCrea returns to the grand Reconstruction mansion where she grew up in North Carolina, now willed to the three grown children following the death of their parents. All three want the house.Fiscal necessity dictates that two must buy a third out. Just as she was torn as a girl, the sister must choose between her decent younger brother and the renegade eldest—the black sheep who covets his legacy in order to destroy it. The adult siblings re-enact the deep enmities and loyalties of childhood, as each bids for a bigger slice of the pie.
Copyright (#ud4ac319c-efa5-510d-893a-df914bb12a31)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 1996
Copyright © Lionel Shriver 1996
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com)
Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780007578023
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007301744
Version: 2015-08-20
Dedication (#ud4ac319c-efa5-510d-893a-df914bb12a31)
TO DON AND PEGGY SHRIVER
from whom, on balance, I have inherited more strengths than foibles—the most parents could hope for any child
A son could bear complacently the death of his father, while the loss of inheritance might drive him to despair.
Machiavelli, The Prince
Table of Contents
Cover (#ucee0f9d1-2ddf-59c8-8f7a-04ae84cd308b)
Title Page (#u6a1607e2-d457-5071-ae58-7464df275c36)
Copyright (#u836253a3-6ae6-568d-9f84-77dde2e4b811)
Dedication (#u44579791-adb3-5548-90e1-3e5c4e88a0ce)
Epigraph (#u8251c0c1-6845-5a6e-b192-eda4177d700e)
chapter one (#uc35e8d19-4986-5562-a681-0ef9b7cf83a7)
chapter two (#u0a2b2f87-8aa7-502c-8966-97f9d718969f)
chapter three (#ua302d864-0488-5cd1-8a2d-62b169e41b02)
chapter four (#ue58d6660-1071-53e5-ad0b-533d3a614b83)
chapter five (#u247fe771-8c18-5796-9333-3f454e93c7ec)
chapter six (#ue96393c6-6b37-5acc-b798-32ba3b18414b)
chapter seven (#u5d2eadc3-fc15-536b-b37d-bc2f139dd7eb)
chapter eight (#udeb86c45-258b-57b9-b09a-51f5d06355bb)
chapter nine (#u261fc7fb-7d1a-5ed2-8115-a708449b3962)
chapter ten (#uac0271bb-c6f7-5480-a29d-c144bf46b904)
chapter eleven (#u25f32743-8bfe-5922-b6f1-9e09d14b6cc1)
chapter twelve (#u294f916d-c396-55ba-8871-c4994d7d1b88)
chapter thirteen (#u5164b386-7610-55a6-8f01-d1ca6eec8afa)
chapter fourteen (#u1a57e9bd-d3b2-5770-be66-b2157e23f531)
chapter fifteen (#ub109448a-532d-508c-be5d-4ce827c5be22)
chapter sixteen (#u69a22a00-b5c6-5964-9f21-e3089a798ff2)
chapter seventeen (#uf411865e-53b2-5337-9443-22f9a7d0dede)
chapter eighteen (#u7b59f6f7-0452-5fb3-9b3b-57031d395a9a)
chapter nineteen (#u1d1adf36-390e-5872-9c71-6c7bbd3391bb)
chapter twenty (#u770f230d-399c-5f33-83b6-1756277057ba)
About the book (#ubc1be8d1-72af-57b4-af9f-ed730a69fdf3)
Praise for A Perfectly Good Family (#u54d532ce-4c15-57e7-91a4-72b030c11580)
About the Author (#u7ba74a89-1093-552a-bb1d-8a7dacb3ebe7)
Also by Lionel Shriver (#u7c657221-3960-5f9d-ae57-be728183cb56)
About the Publisher (#uf1be582f-1cb3-544b-938f-2e079621a35c)
chapter one (#ud4ac319c-efa5-510d-893a-df914bb12a31)
Don’t tell me,” said the taxi driver, rubber-necking at the formidable Victorian manor. “Your mother’s Norman Bates.”
“My mother’s dead,” I said. Harsh, but the information was so fresh for me, only two weeks old, that I was still repeating it to myself.
“Don’t you strain yourself, Missy.” He lunged from the front seat to take the luggage from me: two leather monsters and a bulging carry-on. I’d been overweight at Heathrow, and lucky that in November the plane was not too full.
“You want, I’ll haul these to the porch—”
“Not at all,” I said. “My brother likes to give me a hand. He always has.”
I pulled out a wad of dollars crumpled with fivers, unsure of the form for tipping taxis in North Carolina. An ostensible native, I clung to any ignorance about Raleigh as proof that I no longer belonged here. Skint most of my adult life, I reminded myself I would have more money soon and forced myself to hand over twenty percent. The generosity didn’t come naturally. McCreas are Scots-Presbyterian stock; I have stingy genes.
“But you’re spot on about the house,” I nodded upwards. “It does look like Psycho, all right. The neighborhood children all think it’s haunted.”
And wasn’t it? Handing over the bills, I thumbed Alexander Hamilton; after five years of starchy London tenners, a dollar felt like pyjamas.
“Or The Addams Family, mehbe. Take care now, ma’am. Hope your brother’s a muscly guy. Those cases is killers.”
“He’s pretty powerful.” I frowned. Since I still envisaged Truman as a delicate, timid tag-along about two feet high, that he was a beefy man of thirty-one who lifted weights in his attic living room was disconcerting.
The cab plowed down Blount Street, leaving me by chattel that would have been, until a fortnight before, all I owned. I turned to face what else I owned: a great, gaunt mansion built just after the Civil War.
There was no denying its magnificence. I had shown friends in London pictures of my family: my dark, glamorously beautiful mother in the days when she was genuinely happy instead of pretending to be; my father sporting his lopsided, hangdog grin as he accepted another award from the NAACP; my little brother Truman when he was photographed by the Raleigh Times throwing himself in front of a bulldozer; though I had no pictures, I discovered, of my older brother. None of these snaps made the slightest impression. Yet when I showed them a picture of my house, faces lit, hands clapped, eyebrows lifted. For the English, Heck-Andrews was everything a Southern residence was meant to be: remote, anachronistic, both inviting and forbidding at the same time. It fulfilled their tritest expectations, though I received complaints that there was no Spanish moss. That’s in South Carolina, I’d explain. And then we would get on to why I didn’t seem to have a Southern accent, and I’d be reassured that tell-tale traces had been eradicated.
Even in the last light of the day I could see the clapboard was flaking; so the failing manila paint was now my problem. It was apparent from the pavement that the ceilings of the first two floors were vaulting, all very exhilarating except they were murderously dear to heat, and the price of oil was now, I supposed, my problem as well. Yet paint and heat were only a third my responsibility—and this in itself would shortly become my biggest problem.
It was the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, a holiday which I only ever remembered in Raleigh-Durham, where gift shops were flogging pop-up pilgrim books; letting this exclusively American holiday nearly slip by unnoticed gave me a sense of accomplishment. I zipped up my jacket. No doubt the English didn’t picture the South in winter, but North Carolina has one, albeit mild. In fact, I remembered dressing for school huddled by the floor vent, stuffing my bunched knee-highs by its breath to pre-warm my socks. My parents were McCreas, too, and their remedy to the heating problem was all too simple.
I left the bags on the pavement and strode toward the broad, intricately ornamented front porch that skirted the mansion. This opulent, gregarious-looking expanse with a swing on one end was designed for mint juleps; but my parents had been teetotalers and, rather than recall long languid summer nights with fireflies and low laughter, I pictured squeaking morosely with Truman on the swing, frantic for my parents to go to bed. We hadn’t been very nice to them. Ordinarily on one of my visits home as I approached this same front door I’d be bracing myself for my mother’s protracted, claim-laying embrace—when the more I stiffened, the harder she would squeeze. Once my father died, her hugs had become only longer and tighter and were laced with hysteria. Now I was spared. A dubious reprieve.
We rarely entered through the front door, more comfortable with the side entrance into the kitchen. Ringing the bell, I touched the cold curlicued polygonal panes in the door, one of which had been replaced with plain window glass. The asymmetry never failed to vex Truman. But because the original had been shattered when my older brother put his arm through it—my father had been chasing him through the house to force him to turn down the volume of Three Dog Night—I treasured the flaw. There weren’t many signs of Mordecai left here.
“Corlis!”
In the open door my brother hugged me. He knew how: his hands were firm on my back and he waited a single beat during which he was plausibly thinking about being glad to see me and then he let go. I didn’t take these capacities for granted.
“You should have let us pick you up.”
“Not during rush hour.” The consideration was unlike me. When I gestured to my luggage on the pavement, I thought I was doing Truman a favor by allowing him to heave it in.
“What have you got in these things, a dead body?”
“You might say that.”
“I thought you were only here for a few days.” He muttered, “Girls!” with a smile.
I watched my little brother. He was broad, though to say stocky would suggest fat, which he was not. He liked carrying suitcases because he was a practical person and enjoyed putting his muscles to more beneficial use than for sandbagged press-ups. His face, too, was wide, though in my mind’s eye it remained insubstantial. Likewise, his hair had coarsened and curled; though we were both born blonds, our driving licenses now would read, “Hair: brown.” Yet I refused to relinquish the notion that my brother’s mop was bright gold, a cowlick sprouting from his parting with the spontaneous whimsy of Truman’s childhood, of which there was, in fact, little remnant.
My vision was so corrupted that if I blinked, he no longer sported a close-cropped beard. They don’t make corrective lenses for people unable to focus on the present tense, so that this myopia of mine would soon have me banging into things all over our house which were there now and not in the past—like my brother’s hair-trigger temper. While Truman McCrea as an adult was depressive and given to bilious explosions, I would continue to treat him carelessly, as if he remained the ingenuous, piping, cooperative boy who would do whatever I told him with unfailing trustfulness. He was still, God help him, trusting.
I nudged the cases past the transom and clumped the door shut, rubbing my hands. With Truman controlling the thermostat it was warm in the foyer. Inside Heck-Andrews, with its seasoned oak floor and mahogany paneling absorbing the late sun, evening had arrived. The lamps were lit and for a moment I was taken in: that this was the enclosed, safe, self-contained haven that other people called home. Leering back at me from the facing staircase were the gargoyles on whose pointed ears I’d impaled my crotch as a girl when sliding down the black walnut banisters. It was amazing I could still have children—though not for many years longer.
“Hey, there,” said Averil shyly, hanging back.
I kissed my sister-in-law diffidently, on both cheeks, and stood back to appraise her. There was no reason why Averil should not have been pretty. Her hair was brown as well, but lustrous, while our own was embittered by the memory of its former golden glory and ate the light. She cut hers shoulder length and the locks coiled, turning to her ears as if also shy. She was medium height, though maybe that was the trouble: too much of her was simply medium. Nourished by my brother’s obsessively perfect diet, her figure was trim, though her sway-backed posture was pre-pubescent. Her nose was upturned, expectant, and her eyes were enormous with bashful long lashes, and when they turned to my brother they widened still further, coloring with big brown awe. She adored him. Averil, too, was far older than I pictured her—twenty-eight. I thought: she is nicely proportioned and really ought to be lovely, though I did not think: maybe she is lovely.
I nodded at the stand in the hall. “It’s still there.”
“Yep,” said Truman, pressing his lips like my mother.
Mother’s pocketbook always rested on this doorside table, where it continued to rest, clasped, reposed like a body in a casket. I knew what was inside: a tin of Sucrets gone sticky, the medicine she didn’t take for her heart, and a vast crumple of multi-ply re-used Kleenex pressed with pink lipstick. When we sniffled in church, she would hand us a damp tatter; repelled, we’d snort the mucus down our throats.
“You should cancel the credit cards,” I advised.
I delivered duties to my brother as privileges. For the funeral ten days earlier, I had allowed him to buy the cold cuts and to ring her colleagues at the hospice. This was the kind of graciousness in which I specialized.
We drifted to the formal parlor, though traditionally we’d have preferred the sitting room opposite, a less pompous environment with the TV and torn Naugahyde sofas that was comfortably messy. Some solemnity had entered these proceedings which I didn’t know how to kick. I felt polite.
“My whole life,” said Truman, in his minor key, “I’ve been taught not to go into Mother’s purse without asking. Pawing through her wallet doesn’t come easily.”
Truman fetched us glasses of wine, and I scanned the parlor, no longer milling with Raleigh’s community leaders, hands on my shoulder assuring me what a good woman my mother had been, how deeply committed my father had been to civil rights, and all the while me squirming at their touch, not feeling flattered even on my parents’ account and hoping that when I died no one called me “good”—though considering what I had just left behind me in London, there was little danger of that.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do with all this junk,” said Averil.
At least she was candid. However laborious the task of cluttering such vast floor space, my parents had undertaken the chore with some success. With no less than twenty-four rooms in this house, it was substantially over-furnished. The parlor, for example, was fat with low-riding Danish modern. If Truman is to be believed, my parents did not understand (I would say, did not even like) their own house, and were always fighting its retrograde nature and trying to haul it wholesale into the twentieth century, where, according to Truman, Heck-Andrews not only did not belong but refused to go. Thus none of their “improvements” would take—when my father repapered the upstairs hall with purple peonies, the panels curled to the baseboards that same night. When they splurged on shag for the sitting room, none of the carpet tacks would stay in the floor. I claimed their additions didn’t adhere because my father was a do-it-yourself incompetent—his glue was too thin and he used the wrong nails. Truman, one of the last great anthropomorphizers, was convinced that the house itself had revolted, moulting loud wallpaper and shuddering tatty shag from her boards.
As for the “junk” of which Averil despaired, my parents had been avid travelers, favoring countries with anguishing social ailments: South Africa, Burma, Korea, where they would meet with pastors just out of prison, dissidents running underground presses, and Amnesty International task forces. Somewhere in all that hand-wringing over human rights they’d found time to shop, for this room was busy with been-to bric-a-brac: Namibian carvings, Korean celadon, hand-painted Russian dolls, while the walls were smattered with a mismatch of Japanese sumi birdlife, Indonesian batiks and Masai ceremonial masks.
“I suppose we can help ourselves,” I said. “Like a boot sale at the end of the day, and everything’s free.”
“I wish they’d taken this stuff with them,” said Truman glumly.
“The house, too?” I proposed. “Like Carrie.”
He glared. “How was the opening? Of your show?”
I sculpt. I had flown back to Heathrow after my mother’s funeral to attend my first big break, a one-woman show at a decent London gallery. My mother had been so pleased for me when she heard about it that I didn’t think she’d want me to miss my limelight to moon around this house deciding who got her crockery. Truman had been annoyed by my departure, but no life outside this house was real to him; other cities—Raleigh itself, come to think of it—were names in the air. And I’d done as I promised: I’d come back to haggle over our inheritance.
“It was smashing,” I said.
Coy, but with catastrophes you have to salvage something, if only the odd wisecrack.
My wine had evaporated; I was nervous. I pinged for more, to discover there wasn’t much difference between drinking around my mother and drinking around my younger brother. They both eyed your glass and kept a running count. I often wondered what it was Mother thought I might do or say when I became so fearfully uninhibited. Once she’d become sufficiently alarmed—after two glasses—my bottle would get whisked off and corked, so to slake my thirst I would have to scrounge for my good cabernet hidden gauchely in the back of the fridge. This was subtle strategy. Once we were adults, she couldn’t forbid booze exactly, but she made you go public with how you couldn’t make it through an ordinary evening with your family without drink. She was right. I couldn’t.
I leaned forward and traced the ceramic basketry of a bulbous celadon vase on the coffee table. I worked with clay myself, and had to admire the craftsmanship of its intricate crosshatching, though the aura of the object was cool. If the serene sea-green vase had any thematic content, it was self-congratulation: wasn’t-this-difficult-to-make. It was a gift from a grateful Korean graduate student with wayward political views, whom my father had smuggled into NC State out of Seoul. My parents had been so proud of this thing and it meant nothing to me and now it was mine.
Like my father, Truman couldn’t keep his hands still, but sprang them against each other or twisted his wedding band and then kneaded the back of his neck as if trying to give himself a massage.
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 marvelous, 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 parlor 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 colored 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 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 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.
chapter two (#ud4ac319c-efa5-510d-893a-df914bb12a31)
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 aerie 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 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 Hermann 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.
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 inquired. “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 favorite word—just as 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 independent 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 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 humor, 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.
Here in the middle room he’d laid their hefty darkwood table, solidly built and lovingly refinished. They don’t make things the waythey used to—if you listened to Truman from around a corner you might mistake him for his grandfather, except that my father’s father was not the least bit sentimental about the olden days, was grateful for central heating, and had recently installed his own fax.
We dined on grilled skinned chicken thighs, a mound of rice fluffy with a scant tablespoon of butter and steamed broccoli. I had shared this meal before, and variations followed similar nutritional lines. If I asked my little brother what he believed, leaving aside his convictions about architecture which were equally fanatical, his leading catechism would underscore that carbohydrates must be relied upon for caloric mainstay; in place of deity he would exalt dietary fiber. Amid the malign influences in Truman’s universe, fat ranked first. He might not have gone so far as to call obese people evil themselves, but they were at least the devil’s playground. While my father had got worked up over a black woman dying because she was not admitted to white Rex hospital, his second son only displayed similar choler when a documentary asserted that some people were born fat and couldn’t help it. The worst of determinism, in Truman’s mind.
I shouldn’t complain; if the food was plain it was impeccably prepared—six and a half minutes per thigh side on the second notch down on the grill, one cup rice to one-and-a-third cups water less one tablespoon. Truman was precise, and, in spite of his highfalutin’ and ham-handed father, my brother’s worldview was essentially mechanical.
“Before we meet with the lawyer tomorrow,” Truman mentioned, and swallowed, “I thought you and I might talk about—” when he dabbed his mouth casually, his hand trembled “—the house.”
“What about it?”
“Mordecai’s going to want his share in cash.”
“Probably.”
“He’s a philistine. But what about you?”
We would not hear the details of the will until the following afternoon, but my parents had prepared us for their estate being evenly divided among the three heirs. They must have been sorely tempted to disinherit the eldest altogether, but their idea of themselves as fair liberal parents who did not have preferences among their children won the day.
“Have you a clue how much dosh is left—”
“Dosh?” Truman’s eyes narrowed.
“Money. On top of the house?”
“Nope. With the dosh I saw Father mailing off to every Negro-something charity he could find I bet we’re not coming into a windfall. Still, Father’s salary from the Supreme Court must have accumulated to something. If my share of the cash is enough, I’d be willing to buy both you and Mordecai out.”
“Uh-huh.” I picked a tendon from my teeth. “Since Oakwood has gentrified, this place has appreciated by a factor of several times. I doubt you’ll have the resources.” I found myself hoping that he would not. “What’s Plan B?”
“Well, you and I could buy Mordecai out together,” said Truman promptly.
“Uh-huh.”
“And then, little by little, after I finish my degree and get a job, I could pay you off and eventually you’d get your money, I promise. We could even draw up a contract, with some moderate interest …”
“Uh-huh.” I folded my arms. “In any case, you want to be the one who owns Heck-Andrews. At the end of the day.”
“Well.” He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“But it’s my house, too.”
“In a way.”
“Not in a way. Legally, emotionally, historically—I grew up here, they were my parents as well, and it is partly my house.”
“Okay!” He backed off, but he still didn’t appear to accept that I had, much less Mordecai had, any legitimate claim on what he had already, our mother two weeks dead, assumed as his own property. “The main thing is, we should try and keep it in the family. The last thing we want is to have to sell. Right?”
I didn’t answer.
“Right, Corlis?” He was panicking.
It’s chilling how clinical one can be in the midst of grief, but I had given this matter some thought. I did figure Mordecai would want the money, that Truman wouldn’t come into enough liquid assets to buy us both out, and I could conceivably force the house on to the market. Just as Truman’s impulse with Mordecai and the Britannicas was to deny him the prize, I was tempted to take Heck-Andrews from Truman precisely because it was the one possession he most desired.
“I might go in with you.” I tapped my fork on the table. “But not with the understanding that you eventually buy my share. If I’m going to have a half-interest in this property, I’m going to stay interested.”
Truman looked mystified, and paused in his hoovering of rice. “Why? You live in London.”
Averil mumbled, “Ask her why she brought six pairs of jeans.”
“Don’t you?” he pressed.
“And why she packed shorts. And summer dresses. In November.” Averil was talking to her plate.
I tossed my balled napkin at my chicken bones. “As of today I live in Raleigh.”
I’d fled this town with such desperation that the statement wallowed in my ears with sickening fatalism. The Myth of the Eternal Return: there was no getting away, was there? I felt like one of those paddle balls on an elastic string; the further I bounced away, the harder I would land smack back on my staple.
“Where in Raleigh?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ve been evicted. For now, this is the only place I have to go.”
My brother’s jaw jutted forward, like my father’s. “Don’t you think you might have asked?”
“Asked? Unless Hugh appoints us otherwise tomorrow, I just inherited a third of this place. Why would I need your permission to live in my own house?”
Averil had started clearing the table, pitching silverware on to stacked plates from inches above, crash-crash; then she made quite a project out of bunching all the napkins into a single, furiously tight wad.
“Because other people live in it,” said Truman.
“If this place is so massive,” I reminded him, “that Father wanted to donate half of it to the homeless, it’s obviously big enough for you and me.”
“But I thought you had this great career going. That you had a gallery and you were going to be famous and you’d made your real life in Britain. All that about applying to British immigration for ‘settlement’ … How you liked your new flatmates … And a sidewalk seems like a pavement now.”
“You mean you thought you’d got rid of me.”
“I didn’t—”
It happened again, up-side of the head: I was starting to cry. Averil shot me a quick dirty look, as if tears were cheating. As punishment, she cleared my wine glass.
“What did you mean,” Truman prodded, “you’ve been ‘evicted’?”
When I found the spacious flat in South Ealing I was patching together a living from bootlegging films off the BBC for third-world black-market videos, and part-time messengering in town on a gasping second-hand scooter. At thirty-four, I was wearying of odd jobs and empty pockets for the sake of “my work,” and my attitude toward my higher calling had grown sardonic. However, I’d had just enough encouragement from selling the odd piece privately that I hadn’t, incredibly, given up. The pretension of being an Artist may have made me cringe, and at low-rent parties I never introduced myself as anything but a bohemian ex-pat scavenger. Still, alone with mud, refining a plane or tapering those delicate fingers, I did not want a drink, a fag, a nap, or a chat; sculpting was the single thing I did that was all I wanted to be doing while I was doing it.
What’s more, I savored that my income was illegal. From girlhood I had been a sneak. For four years I’d limped by on tourist or student visas and wasn’t officially allowed to work; I was in my element under the table.
So after I’d made a hash of one more live-in relationship, I may have wished myself beyond the stage of communitarian arrangements with names on milk cartons, but I could not afford a flat on my own, full stop. I posted for flatmates at universities. I knew it was safer—and wouldn’t it have been—to advertise for females, but girls bored me and I grew up flanked by boys.
I had several takers, so I must have selected the winning couple with some care. I don’t know what system I applied—the two men were not in the least alike.
Andrew Finlay was a grad student in political science at the London School of Economics, a scrawny bookish-looking boy with sharp shoulders and tapered wrists. His body was knobby and perverse, with a prominent Adam’s apple and double joints—his elbows bent backwards. Though twenty-four, he looked twelve, an effect he encouraged by wearing outsized overalls bibbing harlequin jumpers, trouser cuffs rolled high to expose rumpled socks and chunky shoes. His facial features were narrow and weaselly, dwarfed by wide National Health horn-rims. Though his grin was sly and he laughed knowingly from the side of his mouth, it didn’t take long to ferret out that Andrew had had meager experience with women.
Peter Larson was a broader man, still well my junior but older than Andrew by six years. He was a Glaswegian, and it took me weeks of deciphering his accent to understand that his ostensible ambitions were in journalism. Such a future was hard to picture, save the bit about boozing up sources at late-license pubs. Peter was on the hapless side, as he cheerfully admitted. He subbed for the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard for a month at a time, but often lost the job for mitching his morning slot, hung over. He was frequently late with his rent, but it was hard to get angry with him; that Peter was unreliable was at the heart of his appeal. While Andrew’s jokes were contrived around esoteric puns or the latest cabinet scandal, Peter’s humor was bawdy, his laughter salacious and inclusive. Besides, he was handsome, a footballer only recently gone to seed, with a square jaw and strong stomach muscles that would bear up under years’ more abuse. I knew how he’d end up: a potbellied, pasty would-have-been blustering through tall tales to avoid paying his round, but foresight inspired me to make the most of his company before he declined to welcher and nuisance.
Since Peter would vanish for days on end, on benders or fast-burn romances he’d never say, I spent a lot more time with Andrew. The younger man was light enough to share my scooter, on which the two of us would top-heavily weave to Stop ’n’ Shop for provisions, to return flapping with plastic bags. His hands resting deftly on my hips sent a warm glow up the back of my neck. Though I might have dismounted grateful to have made it home without capsizing, I’d feel doleful when our mission was accomplished, already chafing to run out of Marmite—his favorite late snack with cold, burnt toast.
An atavistic socialist and paid-up member of Greenpeace, Andrew would wag his slender double-jointed fingers by the hour, lecturing on the betrayals of the Labour Party; I only half-listened. Our more frolicsome times were spent hunched over sticky oilcloth at the kitchen table, where he taught me the conventions of British crossword puzzles. The Independent’s clues were oblique in comparison with the Herald Tribune’s, a distinction which would tempt Andrew to extemporize on how Americans had no sense of irony. I’d retort that the British were self-regarding and coy. Andrew hailed from Bath; his ls converted to ws, his ths to fs and vs. I’d mimic his reading of clues—“Boat of bwuverwy wuv”; he’d caricature my inattentive lapses into a southern accent—“Keeyun-sheeyup.”
I liked to think it inevitable that, as we haggled over 19 across, his hand would eventually drop the pen for mine.
I liked to think it equally inevitable that, on a later night, Andrew off to bed, Peter would burst into the flat when I was only wearing a kimono, let the cup of coffee I fixed him cool as he poured the last of his White Horse for me, until at 4 a.m. the flaps of my kimono would fall open.
Improbably, this went on for months. I counseled each of them in turn that to keep our household amicable it was paramount they neither blurted to the other about any indiscreet flat-mating. Though the two had little in common, they liked each other, and agreed. Andrew said he could see how Peter might feel left out; Peter said, that poor lad’s not getting any crumpet, no reason to shove our sheets under his nose. I doubt two women would have been capable of it, but judging from the ease and hilarity of that period those chaps must have kept their traps shut.
About that time I feel wistful, though I know I shouldn’t—playing double-footsie under the oilcloth; rushing to throw on my jeans when Andrew and I heard a key in the door; pretending wakefulness so that Andrew would lumber off to bed before Peter stumbled jovially in after last call. I knew our trio couldn’t last, but somehow neither man encroached emotionally on the other in my head. Peter was rambunctious and liked to wrestle; he spent no time analysing “our relationship” and he still didn’t tell me where he went on holidays from our flat. Peter would slam-bam; Andrew was tender, solicitous and adventurous in bed. While Peter was oblivious to the crudest details of my existence, Andrew made meticulous inquiry into my past and grilled me on whether I wanted to have children.
Although I’d never have expected appreciation, from Peter in particular, they both adored my sculpture. I fashioned and fired my pieces at a ceramics cooperative in Clapham, but bubble-wrapped them back to the flat, where I unveiled them to my fans in our spare room, to gratifying oohs and ahs.
Good news seems always paired with bad. A fortnight after the three of us had polished off four bottles of champagne to celebrate my coup with the Curlew Gallery, the phone rang again. It wasn’t the middle of the night, which might have prepared me. Truman was admirably factual. He had found my mother in our parlor at ten in the morning, surrounded by old photos of my father. Undoubtedly, her heart.
Both boys were terribly sweet. Andrew got right on the phone to BA, and I hadn’t known there were special rates for emergency bereavements—I got on a flight at half price the next day. He fixed me tea while Peter, predictably, ran for vodka. They both saw me off at Heathrow, while I assured them I’d be back in a few days; I had to put up my show at the Curlew when I returned. Take care of my darlings in the spare room, I said, and kissed each of them, daringly, on the mouth.
They may not have been gossipy girls, but if you put two people of any sex in a room by themselves for long enough they will tell all.
I’d been flirting,” I told Truman, “with both of them. I guess while I was gone they had a few beers with each other, and … well, they must have been mad.”
“So they kicked you out.”
“That’s not all they kicked. Or one of them. When I flew back, no one met my plane. I took the tube, and came home to the flat empty. I was restless, and headed for the back room thinking I could start swathing my pieces in bubble-wrap for transport to the Curlew …” I sighed.
“The hand,” twigged Averil.
“Oh, nobody had taken a pickax to them. I might have preferred that. No, all the hands were lopped off. Every one.”
“Couldn’t you glue them back?”
“Not for a tony London gallery, and the breaks weren’t clean. No, the sculptures were ruined all right. Three, four years’ work at least. I’m back to Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.”
“I find it hard to believe,” said Truman, “that those guys would destroy all that work for flirting.”
It’s true that I sanitize my stories for Truman, but like his mother he’s so gruelingly good.
“You said it was only one of them,” said Averil. “Which?”
“I was surprised. Peter was given to drunken rampages. Andrew was the sensitive, cerebral one. Then, I don’t think Peter would have cared so much. He was savvy, he was wild and casual and had other women. Andrew …”
“Was in love,” said Averil.
“Maybe,” I conceded. “I hadn’t noticed. I probably didn’t want to.”
That night, my spindly lover had returned, having given me just enough time to discover his get-out-of-my-life present. Behind the glare of his horn-rims, his eyes were anthracite. For once, he did look knowing.
“Why the hands?” pressed Averil.
“Because my hands,” I said, “had lied. But they hadn’t really. I liked each of those men. I liked each of them, in a different way, a great deal.”
Whenever my father was asked if he wanted pie or ice cream he would smirk and say he wanted pie with ice cream, so I was raised with the idea I could have both.
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Lionel Shriver
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Following the success of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and ‘The Post-Birthday World’, ‘A Perfectly Good Family’ is coming back into print after being unavailable for years.After having escaped for years to London, Corlis McCrea returns to the grand Reconstruction mansion where she grew up in North Carolina, now willed to the three grown children following the death of their parents. All three want the house.Fiscal necessity dictates that two must buy a third out. Just as she was torn as a girl, the sister must choose between her decent younger brother and the renegade eldest—the black sheep who covets his legacy in order to destroy it. The adult siblings re-enact the deep enmities and loyalties of childhood, as each bids for a bigger slice of the pie.