Читать книгу A Perfectly Good Family - Lionel Shriver - Страница 11

I thought about Mordecai’s false dilemma,” Truman admitted as we squealed on the porch swing late the next afternoon. “I might pay $10,000 for a night with Mother and Father, as long as it were different.”

“Maybe that was his point,” I said, toeing the swing in a figure eight. “That it couldn’t have been different. Therefore, inexorably, if Mother appeared in your dovecot from beyond the grave, in five minutes you’d be fretting for her to leave you alone. That’s the way it was, so that’s the way it was.” A tautology, but I was groping.

“What do you think was wrong?”

“Mother was miserable.”

“Yes, for the last two years—”

“Long before that.”

“And Father never noticed?”

“Come on. Mother was the one who never noticed.”

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

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

“Don’t that beat all,” said Truman.

Like my brothers, I, too, had tried all my life to get away from my parents, the underpinning assumption that of course I couldn’t get away or I’d not have gone to such extravagant lengths as putting the entire Atlantic Ocean between us. The two deaths, one on the other, had therefore arrived with a dumb surprise. Behold, it was more than possible to flee their company; in the end they fled mine.

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

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

I suggested we go for a walk (for Truman, that always meant the same walk); he objected that he walked after dinner and I kicked him. He grumbled and said all right he’d fetch Averil and I pleaded please don’t. “She’ll feel left out!” he objected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks. The last two weeks, I lost some weight.”

“Suits.”

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

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

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

What Oakwood’s architects would not have anticipated was the New South on our left: a faceless array of stoic government granite indistinguishable from dozens of other downtowns north and south. This was the land of Internet and sun-dried tomatoes, no longer butt of barefoot bumpkin jokes, but the most rapidly expanding regional economy of the country, whose Research Triangle labs and industrial facilities drew scientists and magnates from all over the States. I cannot explain it, but none of this new-found sophistication stanched my horror when I slipped and said that’s real nahce or stopped me from lying to Londoners that I was born in New York.

“Do you ever regret not studying architecture?” I asked my brother.

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

“You and Prince Charles,” I said. “Ever miss the hardware truck?”

“Yes,” he said. “Often.”

After high school, Truman went through a “phase”—according to my father. Surely daunted by Sturges McCrea’s professional eminence and degree from Harvard Law, Truman decided to be, as he put it, “regular.” He refused to go to university. I had walked in on several prolix sessions in the parlor—not rows, they were civil—when I visited from Manhattan. Truman would be extolling the simple-honest-man and his simple-honest-job, for wasn’t it ordinary hard-working people who built this country …? My father would rub his chin with a smirk until Truman ran out of euphemisms for unskilled labor, then deliver his own monologue about the value of a liberal arts education and what a privilege it was to “luxuriate in the fields of the mind.”

For years Truman didn’t give in, and considering that I think of him as the family toady he deserves some credit for holding out so long. Truman drove deliveries for Ferguson’s Hardware for a decade. Averil’s father owned the store, and it was there they met; she worked the floor weekends while getting an education degree from NC State. Her father paid my brother execrably even after he became an in-law, though Truman received his fifteen-cent-an-hour raises with the same awed, unquestioning acceptance of divine intervention on his behalf as when his allowance went up to thirty cents from a quarter.

“I understood that job,” he explained. “I got to know the layout of the city the way you did London on your scooter, right? The truck was cosy. It was my truck. I played tapes and sang along and in the winter the heater kept it snug and in the summer I had air conditioning … And I always packed a swell lunch.”

I wanted to say, come on Truman, wasn’t it dull, didn’t you crave something challenging, I mean how can you retain so much affection for a bloody van, for Christ’s sake, but I stopped myself. I do not know why this so rarely occurs to me, but I remembered for once that my brother was not me.

“I thought you found philosophy stimulating.”

“It was okay at first. Lately … Well, you’d think that all those books about is there a God and the implications of mortality and do we have free will would be of some help, right, when your mother dies? If they’re not some kind of explanation or resort, what good are they?”

“Not much.”

“These airy-fairy philosophers are no use at all!” He waved his hands. “I find Mother downstairs one morning, do you think I was going to look up “Mothers: death” in an index? It’s just, Corlis, all these Great Questions, they don’t seem to have anything to do with my life. I used to feel ashamed of myself. I was afraid I wasn’t smart or serious enough to be edified by all that wordy pondering. But now I wonder if maybe I’m plugged in and it’s these cobwebbed old farts who haven’t a clue. When Dr. Chasson launches into the mind–body problem I sit in the back of the class remembering that tomorrow is Tuesday and it’s time to wheel the trash to the curb. But, you know, maybe garbage disposal is actually more important! For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis—I don’t care!”

“Huh,” I considered. “I guess I don’t either.”

“Most people don’t! All they care about,” he added grimly, “is being right.”

Truman had always been given to diatribes, and I found them wonderful.

We had crossed in front of Peace College, passed Krispey Kreme Donuts, and were now ambling down Person Street. Mordecai lived off Person Street, in a basement under the post office to our left, and as if to advertise this fact “Mordecai Florist” (no relation) blinked in neon on this block. Truman sped up; I lingered. I could feel a pulse here, a thrum up through my feet as if my brother’s Rockwell table saw rumbled the whole street; metal shrieked in the distance. Poking off the post office’s far wall, DECIBELLE, INC. swung on the plain black sign, and the back end of the army surplus troop transporter loomed up the slanted drive to the curb. I knew better, however, than to suggest we stop by. On the other hand, had Truman not wanted to risk running into his brother at all he could have eliminated Person from a stroll he took every day. An eccentric flirtation.

We reached a parking sign. We about-faced. We turned around here because he always turned here: the usual logic.

“If you’re so disaffected,” I said, “what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to be a professor,” he recited. To me, Truman’s assertion had the same color as his announcement in third grade: I’m-going-to-be-a-fireman.

“That would make Father happy,” I humored him.

“Father was always happy,” said Truman acidly. “He didn’t care what I did.”

“He spent an awful lot of time convincing you to go to college—”

“He just wanted to win.”

There seethed in both my brothers a resentment I didn’t quite share. Oh, I bore a few grudges—my father never fostered my artistic ambitions, for example. Though once exposed to the caprices of Soho I could see his dissuasions as protective, the charge that I was “no Michelangelo” when I was seventeen still stuck in my craw. He wasn’t an aesthetic troglodyte, either—he adored Rembrandt—but regarded art as a ministerial calling for which you must be God-chosen, and he hadn’t seen any angel Gabriel descending to my messy room. Wouldn’t I consider, he went on to propose, nursing? “Nurses are much in demand in the Peace Corps,” he commended. For years later I was tortured by visions of being stuck in some African mudhole in a peaked white cap.

After my stint in the Peace Corps I was meant to marry, end of story. Despite his lauding of the institution, in my father’s mind once I was boxed off to my wedding he planned to give me no more thought than the Christmas ornaments in his attic: I would be taken out once a year for ceremonial purposes, then restored to my carton. Failing his expectations was the best thing that could have happened to me. Never signed, sealed and delivered to some generic husband, I remained a person, one capable of the “adult conversation” my father had dreamed of. He delighted that I alone of his children shared his love of travel, and I don’t think he ever recovered from his incredulity that the girl of that lot was not, it turned out, a total idiot.

Yet both my brothers fumed, as if denied entry to the garden. They had tried different routes—Mordecai by beating his own path there, through brambles of his making: he’d no formal education past half of ninth grade, and taught himself to wire a mixing board under a bare bulb with a diagram. Just as furiously as my father had given it away, Mordecai had thrown himself into making pots of money, and spending even more. He would earn my father’s respect by doing everything the hard way and anything he wasn’t supposed to. But my father was an authoritarian by nature, and would never reward misbehavior; didn’t, to his grave.

But he wouldn’t reward good behavior, either. He never took Truman seriously, even when his youngest capitulated and enrolled in Duke, even when Truman gave up on majoring in architecture because my father chided that while a “reput-able” calling it was not one in which you’d “make a moral difference.” My father must have known his younger son would adopt properly sublime aspirations eventually because Truman was like that. The youngest had wiped the table and done his homework; he made As and when he wanted to have sex on a regular basis he got married. Surely it was as a very consequence of this obedience that my father dismissed him, leading me to the disconcerting conclusion that parents don’t really want you to do what they say.

My brothers’ ire was not even slightly mitigated by the fact that their father was dead. If anything they were angrier still, for in death there is a way in which you get the last word and I think they regarded the accident as underhanded.

As we once again approached Krispey Kreme, I hung back. “CBC?”

Truman drew himself up. “It’ll ruin your appetite for dinner!”

I looked back at him dully. So this is how it happened: you yearn for years to be old enough to eat doughnuts when you please, at last you grow up, to find yourself reciting platitudes about din-dins. The liberation of adulthood as we’d conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed, we became our own tyrants. “When was the last time you ate a Krispey Kreme?”

“Five years ago. When you made me.” He glared.

“Come on!” I hooked his arm and dragged him through the double doors. Truman could not have looked more glum if he’d been taken hostage in Lebanon.

Krispey Kreme was an institution in Raleigh, and one corner of this town that hadn’t updated its decor since I was a kid. Lit with cold neon twenty-four hours a day, the shop had chrome-rimmed stools, counters the color of surgical gowns, and waitresses in starched nurse-white. With a few crudely drawn posters about breast exams, it would have doubled as a family planning clinic.

“How’re ya’ll today?” The waitress patted down our napkins, and without asking poured us two cups of coffee the color of rusty tap water.

“Cheers,” I said. “We’ll have two chocolate bavarian cremes, won’t we?”

“We will not,” said Truman hotly.

The waitress looked inquiring, and I shot her the imperious glance of the elder whose baby brother didn’t know what was good for him. She recognized authority when she saw it, and retrieved two revolting doughnuts hygienically gripped in wax paper.

“Lovely,” I said.

“You don’t sound like you’re from around here, missy,” she drawled.

Oh, joy, I thought. “No, I’m from London.” I straightened my shoulders and set my tiny serviette in my lap, as our waitress started nattering about the Royals, and was it true that Princess Di made herself upchuck.

“Bloody hell,” I muttered when she retreated. “I thought she’d never stop whittering.”

“Since when,” Truman charged loudly enough for the waitress to hear, “were you not born in Raleigh, North Carolina?”

I hunched over my pastry and muttered, “From. I came from London, I didn’t say I was born there. Now eat your doughnut.”

He wouldn’t. He arched back from it stolidly, as I had from cold pot-roast on Sunday afternoons.

My own snack was unexpectedly melancholic. Sure, it was shite—the custard filling hadn’t been within miles of an egg, all cornstarch and yellow coloring, but the dough itself was motherly, and the chocolate icing formed a nice crinkly skin over the top. I made a right mess of it, and was enjoying myself until I looked at Truman, arms folded in disgust, doughnut untouched.

“Something wrong with this here creme-fill?”

“Aside from having about six hundred empty calories—”

“There is only something wrong,” I interrupted, “with my kill-joy brother. Can we have that take-away, please?

“You needn’t have been rude,” I whispered out the door.

“And you needn’t have lied,” said Truman. “If you’ve really come back to Raleigh for good, you’re going to have to can that Cheerio! la-di-da.”

“Just cause Ah come home don’t mean Ah have to sayound lahk a moh-ron.”

“Keep practicing,” he said as we loped down Bloodworth. He grabbed my waxed paper bag and dropped the bavarian creme summarily in a passing bin. My brother was getting uppity.

“So have you?” asked Truman. “Come back for good?”

“For a while, I guess. For years I was driven to get away—from this town, from our family. Why do you think I wanted to hit Krispey Kreme? At least it hasn’t changed. Because lately, the past is getting away from me.”

I had long regarded my history as a ball and chain, so had spent every spare minute trying to file it off. Raleigh itself had seemed a purgatory of the obscure whose most malevolent power was to suck me back. In two short years I realized that the past was instead terrifyingly evanescent. Increasingly, the town where I grew up did not exist.

“I mean, now Mordecai’s going to force our house on the market,” I went on. “Maybe that’s the limit. No house, no parents—I’m not sure I want to be that free.”

We were on the outer edges of Oakwood, where the Colonial Revivals were smaller and closer together, painted in original Reconstruction colors that approached garish—magentas, lavenders, and corals glared on window sashes, which must have suited the onslaught of posh homosexuals that had recently moved in en masse. We turned on Polk Street to enter Oakwood Cemetery, where the setting sun lemoned gravestones on hillocks.

We hiked up to the Confederate burial ground, a grid of modest identical slabs a foot high, engraved with nameless dates. After the Civil War, Union troops still occupied Raleigh. They refused to allow Confederate dead to remain in the federal cemetery on Tarboro Road, insisting that the corpses—gray in every sense now—be exhumed to make room for Union graves: one more Southern grudge to bear, and this town thrived on them. In 1867 the Wake County Memorial Association dug up some five hundred bodies and lugged them over here. Later, the same association hauled corpses down from the heathen North, and now there were 3000 Confederate graves on this hill. We used to play here as children, upsetting the caretakers with our shrill irreverence, and swiping plastic stars and bars from headstones to bring home and deliberately appall my father.

The official halfway point in Truman’s walk was a small memorial house erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with cold cement benches and flagstone floor. The damp, still air was sweet with unraked leaves. From one of many bronze plaques to fallen rebels inset in granite, Truman read out:

Furl that banner, softly, slowly!

Treat it gently it is holy—

For it droops above the dead.

Touch it not—unfold it never,

Let it droop there, furled forever,

For its people’s hopes are dead.

“The American South,” I observed, pretentiously like my father, “it’s the only place I know that revels in defeat. Most countries, after suffering ignominy, try to put it behind them.”

“Did you ever notice,” said Truman, “that Father’s attitude toward the Civil War was a little weird?”

“Weird? It made him mad.”

“But he wouldn’t work himself into an abolitionist lather. He was mad at Sherman. Like everyone else.”

True, and I treasured the inconsistency.

We tripped out the south cemetery gate and threaded through the margins of Oakwood, where big black mamas still darned socks on splintered porches. The central part of the neighborhood had gentrified, and now contained the highest concentration of Ph.Ds in the city limits. It was thanks to the Eighties boom that Heck-Andrews had multiplied into a staggeringly far-sighted investment, for this had not always been an upscale locale.

Oh, it started that way, though these tattier homes we strolled past now had been built for the Negro cooks and housekeepers who toiled in the Big Houses, like ours. Yet little by little the help didn’t remember their place and encroached on Oakwood proper, and in their wake many white owners fled.