Читать книгу A Perfectly Good Family - Lionel Shriver - Страница 10

As we collected back on Hillsborough, Truman loitered a few feet away, a bullish, belligerent aspect disguising the same lost and stricken countenance he displayed when he was four. It would have been like Mordecai to woo us to one of the pricey eateries that had sprung up in Raleigh while I’d been gone, where he could stage the profligate debauch for which he was renowned around town; glaring from a distance, Truman apparently found his brother’s enthusiasm for meeting up later at Heck-Andrews suspicious. Truman had grown so fiercely protective of our house that he didn’t invite guests of any description, much less his big brother.

But I rather liked Mordecai’s effect on my former sidekick; once our trio parted ways and the two of us returned to the Volvo, Truman clapped a hand on my shoulder and said, “What a mess!” in a tone that suggested that at least it was our mess, together, and then asked if I wanted to drive; for the first time since my arrival I felt he was glad I was there. In the car, too, we had a feast of things to talk about, starting with that charitable bequest.

“Don’t that beat all!” said Truman, quoting our childhood favorite, Andy Griffith, who resembled our father.

“Cutting in the ACLU was totally predictable.” I said. “It’s surprising those first amendment flunkies didn’t walk off with the lot.”

“Mordecai embarrassed me. Comes into money from parents he never gave howdya-do and then complains it’s not enough.”

“Mordecai feels chronically shafted.”

I had promised to lay in provisions for Mordecai’s “secret recipe” spaghetti sauce. Soothed by the shimmy of our cart in Harris Teeter, my little brother cheered up. While many find shopping tedious, Truman looks forward to Harris Teeter all week.

“I know this sounds crazy,” he confided by the paper towels, “but I love running out of supplies so that I can replace them.”

I’d seen it: the shine in his cheeks when he lathered a soap splinter, from satisfaction it was his last bar; the flourish of his hand when he vanquished the tarragon so he could buy a new jar. When he collapsed a box of Total into the bin he spanked his palms, as if he’d accomplished something. Truman liked to have needs. At least the illogic wasn’t lost on him, but I wondered if this delight in dispatching products in order to re-acquire them wasn’t a functional definition of the middle class.

Consequently, as our cart mounded my brother’s chest expanded and his step sprang—shopping, he was concentrated, efficient, authoritative about brands of tinned tomatoes. In a grocery store, Truman was pig in shite.

We returned having agreed it was time to move operations to the main kitchen. Truman took obvious relish in unpacking. Although I was sometimes frustrated by the close perimeters of his life, within those boundaries he thrived. Maybe to him who celebrates a fresh jar of mayonnaise belongs the kingdom of heaven. Truman shoved the Winn-Dixie ketchup aside for proper Heinz, swept away the broccoli rubber bands, and set about alphabetizing the spice rack. This would be the first time he’d cook here since my mother died, a festive and solemn occasion both. Truman had ambitions to enlarge his world by exactly two floors.

As he burrowed in the pantry, Truman’s high spirits precipitously dropped when the back door slammed. He turned to confront, among his nutritionally correct carrots and ten-pound bag of Carolina long grain, a liter bottle of aquavit.

Hee-hee-hee …

Truman’s face folded down like a garage door. Truman claimed to dislike his brother; I thought his dislike was occluded by terror.

I suggested we all have a drink before preparing dinner. Brothers beelined for opposite corners of the parlor, Averil taking the love seat behind her husband’s chair so that her view of her brother-in-law was physically blocked. She picked up a copy of The Christian Century and looked rapt.

When I solicited Truman with a glass of wine, I found him hunched over a piece of stationery. I recognized the sheet with its black border as the bill for our mother’s funeral expenses. (Exorbitant—I suspect that out of sheer frugality she’d have preferred we bury her in the backyard, like a beloved dog.) He scribbled additions and divisions, tortoiseshell reading glasses down his nose.

I brought Mordecai a shot of aquavit, whose single ice cube he fished out and threw in the fireplace. He raised the glass to the lamplight and squinted through his yellow-tinted lenses at the mere finger remaining, knocked it back, and returned the empty glass. I soldiered to the kitchen where the bottle was lodged in the bulging stand-up freezer. I wondered if he really liked caraway schnapps, which smelled like liquor fermented from a ham sandwich, or whether what he liked was the fact it was repulsive.

On a whim I took down my mother’s last grocery list, scrawled on old “Bob Scott for Governor” notepad paper and still magneted to the refrigerator door, and pulled a nubby pencil from a drawer. I had an itch to make my own calculations. The chart I constructed on the back of the list so amazed me that I wondered at having never drawn it up before:

By way of explication: every child has sooner or later to face down the farcical liberal fiction that his parents love each child equally well, a myth Sturges and Eugenia enshrined in their will, as if to convince themselves. Bullshit. Parents have favorites. Mine did their best to camouflage these preferences, my father by being indiscriminately aloof, my mother by being indiscriminately clingy. But as Sturges McCrea had himself opined, prejudice will out.

Hence my chart. If we counted the ACLU as the fourth child and allowed each parent to rank the McCrea kids on a preference scale from 1 to 4, we all four earned exactly five points. I had to admire the symmetry, contrived by two people neither mathematically minded and only egalitarian in an official sense. My father fought for justice his whole life, so naturally my parents would mete out love along with the real estate in equal portions.

Though Mordecai’s glass was beginning to sweat, I paused to study my handiwork. Unquestionably, the ACLU came first in my father’s affections; it did not wet the bed or require a ride to the school play when he planned to take the car. There was equally no question—and I say this in my mother’s defence—that however faithfully she parroted his views and encouraged his checks out the door, for my mother the ACLU straggled in a far fourth. She was incapable of getting exercised over progeny she couldn’t treat to a Popsicle, a ward who would never arrive at the back door trying to hide his report card or waving the winning essay on the school cafeteria. She was a real mother.

As for Truman, that of the warm-blooded kids he was the runner-up with both parents explained a doggedness in him, a we-try-harder, like Avis. If he could merely succeed in besting one sibling with each parent he could walk away with first prize. To this effect he had repaired their hot water heater, retacked their stair carpet, and rolled their wheely-bin to the bottom of the drive every Tuesday morning.

Yet my father’s choice of Truman over Mordecai betrayed his weaker side. Sturges McCrea vilified his eldest son for being an arrogant, obstinate, pushy, demanding chancer—ergo, for being just like his father. How much easier to manage, that docile, introverted boy who would never dare the f-word in front of his mother; a “late bloomer” with a queer fancy for architecture that my father found cute; a man (though I doubt my father ever thought of Truman as a man) too practical, or too cowardly, to move out of his parents’ house, and married to a wallflower who was inarticulate about politics and therefore failed to impress. Truman didn’t give my father competition.

My mother, too, eschewed competition, which is why in her books I came in third. With the wicked timing of the heedless teenager, I began to mature, or “grow curves,” as she would say, right around the time my mother started to sneak a second piece of pie. I always hated that expression, grow curves, which implied putting on weight. Instead I was whippet-thin in my teens, and my mother never forgave me.

It would be absurd for me to take her low rating personally; and I still kept an edge on the ACLU. Yet that among his burpy-poopy-screechy children I was my father’s favorite was also impersonal. My father adored me and my mother wished I would put a bag over my head from the same neutral ontology: I was the girl.

Perhaps the single surprise on my chart, then, was Mordecai, who would himself have been taken aback that he’d remained, after so many shouting matches, his mother’s pet. Maybe all women prefer their first-born sons. She always stuck up for him, though her advocacy often took the form of despair. I was glad for Mordecai that he’d retained a stalwart ally—he needed one.

Still, her partiality had its exasperating aspect. Had Mother’s devotion to number-one son been less fierce, she might have dismissed his foul language as puerile defiance best undermined by refusing to take issue. (My mother was one of the last late twentieth-century Americans for whom the f-word still had punch. It truly shocked her, like a physical slap, and left a brilliant red imprint on both cheeks. Since her heart attack, I had reached for an expletive and could not find a word sufficiently crude for my purposes. In the absence of offended audience, there is no obscenity; with my mother dead, it was impossible to be horrid.) But no—she had to dote on Mordecai, and so he could destroy her. She’d coronated the ingrate, which was like crowning the son most likely to chop off your head.

I turned the chart back over, and re-magneted the grocery list to the fridge, savoring that an entire family calculus rested underneath our continuing need for toilet paper.

Having delivered the aquavit, I stood in the parlor doorway, surveying the results of nearly forty years’ worth of primary school arithmetic.

“See, no measurement can be perfect,” Mordecai was expostulating. “But traditional science has always operated on the assumption that niggling influences, small mis-estimations, can be overlooked. Chaos theory trashed that. That one rounding off, the one pesky speck you failed to take into account, can overturn your results completely.”

“Like The Fly,” I said, but Truman wasn’t listening. Averil wasn’t listening. I felt like my mother, who kept up the naïve conviction to the last that all you need do for a “special time” is put enough blood relations in the same room. And for God’s sake, it wasn’t as if we had nothing to talk about. Far from wanting for subject matter, we were sitting in it.

“Man,” said Mordecai, as he propped his thick black lace-up boots on my mother’s fragile coffee table; its fluted edge began to creak. “How do you like that pompous horseshit about the ACLU? That was all Father cared about, causes. Never mind his kids.” On an open Britannica, he arranged a pack of Bambus and tin of Three Castles; shreds of tobacco dribbled across thin pages of cramped paint. “They felt guilty for living. Mother never splurged on a box of chocolates that she didn’t feel bad about.”

“She felt bad,” I added, “because they made her fat.”

“Hell, by the time you guys came along, they’d got downright profligate,” Mordecai went on. “Dirt, that was all I had to play with.”

“Dirt,” said Truman, not looking up from his equations, “and us.”

Mordecai liked to portray his childhood as threadbare, but often omitted that my father hadn’t been picking through Belmont’s garbage, but going to Harvard Law School. Boasting about your underprivileged background must be one more mark of the middle class. I had a feeling Real Poor People didn’t brag about it.

“I’m just floored,” said Mordecai, “that they didn’t salt away more than 300,000 lousy smackers. They saved enough dough on me. Moving out in ninth grade? No college tuition? And then I borrow 14,000 crummy dollars and it gets subtracted. All that we-love-you-we-want-to-help-you and they kept track.”

I knew that when people were hurting they often seemed recriminating and spiteful from the outside, as Andrew had let me know how much he cared for me by smashing years’ worth of my best work. Truman, however, would go to no efforts to rationalize his brother’s insensitivity, since to whatever degree he enjoyed Mordecai’s company at all it was when his brother hanged himself. There was a grim look of satisfaction on Truman’s averted face, as if he were already relishing the conversation with me later when he could once again cast his eldest sibling as a grabby, selfish boor.

“Don’t worry, Mordecai will make out okay,” Truman muttered, circling a figure in his lap. “He’ll walk away with $156,000, if Hugh’s numbers are right.”

“That’s if we sell the house,” said Mordecai, who seemed to have already arrived at this figure in his head.

“Or,” said Truman slowly, “if Corlis and I buy you out.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Mordecai shut the Britannica on his tobacco threads and tossed it on the floor, where its spine bent at an uncomfortable angle like an accident victim you aren’t supposed to move. He leaned forward and tapped ash on the carpet. “Here’s a check, buddy, now run along and we’ll pretend we never met.”

“Maybe we haven’t,” said Truman tersely.

“Buy me out is exactly what Mother and Father did, for years, and got off cheap at that. And now look—even dead, they want it back.”

Finally Truman looked up from the invoice. “Nobody kicked you out, you left. You never wanted to be a part of our family, and you weren’t a part of it, so take your thirty pieces of silver and leave us alone.”

Truman’s muscles were straining the shoulders of his green workshirt, whereas Mordecai’s shirt only strained at the buttons above his belt. Of the two, Truman was technically much stronger. Yet in the face of the older’s impervious relaxation and bemused little smile, Truman may as well have been lofting rubber darts at a tank.

Mordecai reached for the woven celadon vase on the coffee table, turning from his brother as if neglecting an annoying bee that is not worth the trouble of pursuing and swatting at all over the room. “What’s this from?” he asked me, bouncing the ceramic from hand to hand like a basketball.

“Oh, some Korean gratuity …” I stuttered, nervous for it, and feeling apologetic for my parents’ trinkets.

“So this is part of my inheritance?” he inquired, still hefting the pot back and forth.

“Lucky you,” I said.

Without further ado, he palmed the vase as if for a free throw, and launched it past Truman’s nose to the far corner. It smashed into a hundred pieces with a sound as if an entire china cabinet had pitched on its face. Then Mordecai stood to arch his eyebrows at me, holding his empty tumbler upside-down by way of complaint.

“Maybe,” I said unsteadily, “it’s time to make dinner.”

I had learned from my mother to employ food as a proxy in domestic relations, just as Truman had detoured his complex affections for his family into a simpler alliance with our architecture. At least as we four bustled over cutting boards, the chop of cleavers and scrape of spoons filled what would have been, for fifteen minutes, numbed silence.

It may be sissy of me, but I’ve always been fascinated by how people cook. Take Averil, for instance: I gave her the job of making garlic bread. Easy, right? And quick. But no. First off, she adds a timorous amount of garlic to the butter, and has to be bullied into pressing several more cloves. She mashes the butter for ten minutes, mortified by the prospect of an unbroken clump startling an innocent diner with a burst of zing. When she advances to the baguettes, she saws the bread slowly as wood, and dithers the blade back and forth after every slice before committing to another, intent on identical twins. When in mid-loaf she severs it in half instead of cutting just to the bottom crust, she lets the knife droop dejectedly as if she has just failed a geometry test. Buttering, she dabs and peers and dabs, until I find it too excruciating to watch further. In the time it takes her to make garlic bread, the whole rest of the meal will have been prepared and the table set.

Averil was daunted by food, along with a great deal else. That she was a substitute teacher in the Raleigh public school system suggested that I had either over-estimated the significance of garlic bread or under-estimated the unruliness of North Carolinian teenagers. In the kitchen, she was always looking over her shoulder to make sure she’d done nothing wrong. She wanted to please the food itself, to earn its approval; perhaps someone in her childhood had delivered draconian punishments for piddling mistakes. Of flavor in general she was leery, her primary concern that there should not be too much.

Where Averil is painstaking, Truman is brisk. They share an exactitude—Truman’s diced onions are all the same size square. Yet while Averil might take an hour trimming and snapping green beans one by one, my little brother lines them up ten at a time and dispatches two pounds in ten minutes. And where Averil is timid, Truman is judicious. The heat under Truman’s sautéing onions is medium. The amount of salt in his pasta water is some.

The confidence with which Truman wielded a cleaver had always meant to me that, beneath his closeted, suspicious-of-strangers, why-go-out-let’s-stay-home day-to-day, teemed a brusque, masculine certainty that never got out of the house. About his assembly-line methodicalness I was less enthusiastic. He was capable of experimentation, but if he ever dolloped the beans with pesto and it was tasty, then he would always dollop them with pesto in future. Truman seized on answers and kept them. I think if you presented a meal to Truman and said, This meal is good; it isn’t remarkable or memorable, but it is healthy and competently prepared and it will never make you grow “love handles”; if you push this button you may have this same dinner for the rest of your life, he would push the button. On Truman repetition never wore thin. I hadn’t ascertained whether he was congenitally incapable of boredom, or whether he was so fantastically bored, all the time, that he was unacquainted with any other state.

Myself? In the kitchen, I am whimsical and I flit. I measure nothing, adding dashes of this and fistfuls of that until I have made either a brilliant dish that can’t be repeated or an atrocious one that shouldn’t be. This evening I sneak more olive oil into the vinaigrette than Truman would allow. However, I can’t choose between adding capers or green peppercorns to the salad and so opt for both, which is foolish. I do this all the time: torn between accents, I’ll sacrifice neither, and the flavors conflict. The last thing I am is methodical; I grind a little pepper until my tendons tire, peel one carrot when I will need to peel five, slice a tomato and have a sip of wine. Washing the lettuce I get impatient since I grew up with a younger brother who would do all the drudgery and I am a little spoiled; the salad will later be gritty. Meanwhile, I hover over the others and I pick. I crunch raw green beans, sample the simmering onions, slip off with a surreptitious spoonful of pesto, swipe a heel from Averil’s garlic bread. She squeals. By dinnertime I will have ruined my appetite, but I enjoy food I snitch more than whole permitted portions at table. Most of my pleasures are devious.

The real study, however, was Mordecai, extended at the table smoking roll-ups and slurping aquavit. He ran his own audio-engineering company and was used, like me, to drones dispensing with the shit-work. He only roused himself for the foreman’s role of spicing the tomato sauce. Mordecai cooked rarely—he and his wife Dix went out nearly every night—but inexperience never stopped my older brother from being an expert at anything.

If Mordecai has a motto in cooking, it reads: quantitus, extremitus, perversitus. Compulsively industrial, he promptly opens three times more tinned tomatoes than necessary. He presses two whole bulbs of garlic into the onions (while Averil’s eyes pop) and proceeds to dilute the paste with the entire bottle of ten-dollar pinot noir I have opened to breathe for dinner. He shakes the big jar of basil with visible frustration, pries off the perforated top, and dumps in another quarter of a cup. He tastes the sauce, looks dissatisfied, throws in more basil, looks dissatisfied—in point of fact, Mordecai never looks satisfied—throws in some more, and advances to thyme. I peek in the pot to find that the sauce is turning black. But even after he has killed most of the oregano as well he casts about the kitchen as if the insipid slop still tastes like baby pap. He lights on the cone from my coffee that morning, and spoons in about half a cup of grounds. Only with this addition does Mordecai look pleased. His last stroke, a torrent of hot pepper flakes, leaves me praying we are out of cayenne.

When at last we sat down, Truman and Averil each took as small a spoonful of the sauce on their pasta as etiquette allowed. Even with Mordecai, Truman was polite. He did mutter, “If this recipe is a secret, I think we should keep it,” but under his breath. The spices were chewy, and coffee grounds wedged in my teeth, though all I could taste was red pepper. I commended Averil on her garlic bread, which did a decent job of damping the fire in my mouth.

Mordecai himself made a show of gusto, his serving mountainous, an extra snow of chili flakes over the top. He kept the schnapps at his elbow by some triple-strength black coffee and alternated slugs of each. At thirty-eight, he still wouldn’t eat his vegetables.

“So kid,” said Mordecai, spaghetti worming down his chin, “how’s the philosophy degree?”

I intervened, “He’s got a 3.8 grade point average. Don’t you?”

Truman looked at me darkly, as if what I had blurted was shameful, which in Mordecai’s terms I suppose it was.

Truman’s affairs addressed, we moved to mine. “How about your sculpture, Core?”

Now, Mordecai himself was one of those entrepreneurs whose big break was always around the corner. I couldn’t count the times that he had arrived at Heck-Andrews, to stretch back and toss six digits around in the poignantly misguided assumption that money would impress my father. Yet the big round figures floated in on a puff of his chest, and floated out with a shrug of his shoulders; the New York recording studio contract would simply never come up again, and no one would ask. Only because the next time my brother would be back for a “loan” to see him through a “cash-flow crisis” would we understand tacitly that one more big break had not come through. In this regard I was truly sorry for my brother: that he was unable to share with his family a single grievous disappointment, of which he must have suffered so many.

However, those who don’t share their tragedies don’t invite yours. “I got a gallery interested,” I said, and didn’t attempt even an abbreviated version of my disaster.

The rest of our meal was consumed with yet another contract that Mordecai was sure he’d win for Decibelle, Inc. whose syllables he caressed with more sensuousness than he ever used naming his wife. I could only find it ironic that Mordecai was a self-taught audio engineer when the last thing he ever did was listen. We were treated to all the costly components he planned to install in a local nightclub; his rhythmic recitation of brand names and model numbers—the Stanley-Powers-Ebberstein-and-Whosits m2xy 50001-bh—gave his monologue a liturgical lilt, and my head began to list from Sunday morning narcolepsy. I felt an irrational urge to play Hangman on a church bulletin. As with any sermon, you didn’t interrupt, you didn’t participate, and you didn’t take any of it on board bar the fact that it was over.

Averil began to clear up, and stared down woefully at the pot where two gallons of Mordecai’s “secret sauce” remained.

“Freeze it,” I advised, and Truman laughed. Mordecai didn’t get it.

“Man …” He extended while the table cleared itself, and lit another roll-up. “This may sound uncool, but Mother dropping out of the game is something of a relief.”

“A relief?” The tendons in Truman’s forearms rippled as he carried off a tower of plates.

“Yeah.” When Mordecai tipped the chair back on two legs and slapped his stomach for emphasis, I puzzled how he’d managed to pick up so many of his father’s mannerisms, having left home in ninth grade. “She wasn’t ever happy after Father died, right?”

“Sometimes,” Truman objected tightly, scraping his wife’s spaghetti into the rubbish. “Besides, if she didn’t have anyone else to live for, whose fault was that?”

“Hers,” insisted Mordecai. “They lived in a smug self-congratulatory unit of two. Don’t kid yourself that we ever meant much to them—or that we could have made the slightest difference when Father was gone.”

Truman ran water in the sink, and kept his back to his brother. “You didn’t make much difference, that’s for sure.”

“Didn’t you ever imagine what it might be like if she lived to a hundred? Getting heavier and weak in the head, talking about Father all the time? Wetting her bed, no longer able to drive? Hell, yes, I’m relieved. She’s better off, and so are we.”

“The important thing, of course,” said Truman, “is how we are.”

As Truman plopped glasses into the soapy water, Mordecai wrapped his hand around his tumbler, and Averil, I noted, did not have the nerve to clear Mordecai’s glass.

“I find it a little hard to picture,” Truman went on, his voice almost affable in a way that unnerved me. “You driving to buy her groceries; you listening to the day they met in the Young Democrats for the eighty millionth time; you rolling up her smelly sheets and tucking in fresh ones. So what all are you relieved of?”

“You’re damn right I wouldn’t have changed her sheets. You would have, kid. I’m not that much of a sucker.”

Truman gripped the counter on either side of the sink, his head bowed. The veins in his hands were raised, shocks of hair on his crown standing on end like a cat’s in a corner.

“She dunked our stinky diapers and mopped up our vomit when we were sick. She cooked supper every night and if it wasn’t always gourmet we didn’t starve. It seems fair enough to expect something in return.” At last Truman turned his head. “If I’d have done it and you wouldn’t that doesn’t make me a sucker but you a cad. If it weren’t for Mother, you wouldn’t even be here.”

I had the feeling he was blaming her.

“Shit,” said Mordecai, rocking his chair on its back legs with his boot on the table. “I didn’t ask to be born, did I? She wanted to have kids, she had kids. Diapers went with the territory. I’ll tell you this, I didn’t want their favors. I wiped my own ass as soon as I was able, and at the age I could so much as turn a hamburger I walked. You’re the one who chose to stick around home until, what? Twenty-eight?” (Truman was thirty-one.) “You’d have cooked her strained peas, because she got you—you owed. I didn’t. So maybe I’m relieved for you, bro. There aren’t a lot of good sides to people kicking it, but she saved you a twenty-year nightmare and I’m just suggesting you admit it.” The front legs of his chair hit the floor.

Truman sudsed glasses furiously, though with his usual system, all the wine glasses at once, lining them on the left; he would rinse them in matching sets.

“What she saved you,” said Truman, “was money. If she’d lived longer, she’d have used up what you already seem to regard as inadequate compensation for putting up with her company an entire fourteen years of your life.”

“All right,” Mordecai proposed blithely. “You think I’m so money-grubbing? Let me pose you a hypothetical question. Say, Mother’s dead. A fairy appears, and offers you one more evening with your mother. A whole night. There’s one catch: you have to pay for it, out of your inheritance. Now, how much would that night be worth to you, bro? Would you pay $20,000? $15,000?”

“That’s a false dilemma,” Truman croaked. “It’s not fair, it’s not real. That’s like asking who do you love more, your mother or your father, when you can love both of them.”

“But you do love your mother or your father more, don’t you?” pressed Mordecai. “Besides, my little fairy isn’t absurd. You said yourself, the longer she lived the less we got, so every night did cost money, didn’t it? You haven’t answered me. How much would the hand-squeezing and hot cocoa be worth to you? $1,000? $500? Ten bucks?”

“I’d pay anything!” Truman cried.

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

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

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

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

“Something of an accomplishment growing up in this lofty loony bin,” he announced, “I live in a world of balance sheets. I understand that everything costs, and I mean costs money. Even sentimentality you’ve gotta pay for. So if you’re going to go all wobbly over this house here, you’re going to have to fork out, okay? And you haven’t got all day. No way am I going to wait around for eons while you figure out how to save this dump. I’m going to Garrison next week to file for partition. The clock’s ticking, kid. This firetrap is going on the market whether you like it or not. Maybe it’ll go for three-eighty, maybe more. Maybe you and Corrie Lou can bid high enough for it, maybe not. Only one way to find out.”

He knocked back the last of his liquor, and capped the bottle to go. “I’ve got to get to work. I’ll just leave you with the thought, kid: Would you swap your house for your mother? And be honest.”

The back door slammed on an ugly question, since in a sense, as Mordecai well knew, Truman had replaced his mother with a house. While she was alive, he had lavished more abundant attention on this structure than he had on her, so that when Truman tenderly retouched baseboards and caulked the bath I suspect she was jealous.

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

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

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

“Of course not.”

He slumped. “I am.”

“Oh?”

“What Mordecai said,” he proceeded morbidly, rubbing his eye with the back of his hand. “I’d thought about it. I was afraid she’d live forever. You’d be in England … Mordecai’s no use … I’d have been stuck. And now I got out of it, didn’t I?”

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

“You don’t know what it was like,” said Averil. “The last two years. She never left us alone. She was always baking us pies.”

“How terrible,” I said.

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

Averil was right. When Mother handed my father half her slice, you could see her calculating that if her husband ate three times as much dessert as she did then she had to be dieting. Without him, she’d have plumped someone else to be eating less than. Mother had her truly generous moments, but would not have cannoned lemon meringues at Truman’s dovecot—and at his petite young wife—only to be kind. Fudge, pecan, peach crumble—you name it, my mother’s pastry shells were impeccably tooled and would have been aimed in a fusillade at her daughter-in-law’s gut.

“We told her to stop once,” said Averil quietly.

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

Truman groaned. “That was horrible.”

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

“Except for working at the hospice,” Truman lamented, “she was always home.”

“He said no, thank you,” Averil went on. “We’d discussed it. We weren’t going to accept another pie. We always ate it, and then felt ill. We considered throwing them away, but knowing your mother, she’d find out.”

“What happened? Did she cry?”

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

I got up and banged cabinets, rattled silverware, picked up drying coffee cups and slammed them on the counter with my lips pressed white. “I thought you liked my pie!” I gasped. (My mother’s speech pattern was emphatic, as if were every word not anchored to its sentence with underlines it would wash out to sea.) “All these years I suppose you’ve been doing me a favor?”

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

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

“You said damn?”

“I said damn. She turned purple and said there was no need to curse. I said I didn’t like to eat a lot of sugar, but then she started on about Father, so …”

“You ate the pie.”

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

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

“It had raisins,” said Averil blackly.

“After that—did you keep getting pies?”

“Yes.” Truman sighed. “Only ever since, she acted nervous, maybe we didn’t want it and she’d offer to take it back or make an injured little joke, so we had to act exaggeratedly thankful. I think we got slightly fewer pies on average, but from then on we couldn’t scoff them upstairs but had to make a show, sharing dessert with Mother in the kitchen and agreeing about how cinnamon with blueberry was a nice touch. We may have had them less often, but the slices were gigantic and the scene was always tense. So tense you really had to wonder why she kept rolling them out.”

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

Truman stared at his hands as if they had just wrapped around someone’s neck. His chest shuddered, and lay still. “I raked the yard. I vacuumed. I cleared pine needles from the gutters and installed new pipes in the upstairs bath. I’d do anything but sit down with her for a cup of coffee, and that was all she wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Truman—”

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

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Any normal son with a heart.”

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

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

“As I recall, the big accomplishment was to get her to knock.”

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

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

“So we had that confrontation. After which—theatrically—she’d knock. This turned out to be important, since there were some mornings I had to stuff Averil up the spiral staircase to hide on the tower deck.” He was worked up, but couldn’t help smiling.

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

I had heard these favorite stories before.

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

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

“Mother,” I provided.

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

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

“So sometimes,” I noted, “you did hit her.”