A Perfectly Good Family (15 page)

It was before the cathedral of eternal life that Truman and Averil now stood, stepped fearfully back with its great door agape: the awesome stand-up freezer. Truman had unplugged it, like the villain in
Star Trek
who turns off life support for space travellers in suspended animation. The baggies were just beginning to glisten, frost yielding to that treacherous world of decay that my mother spent her life defying. On the floor yawned two heavy-duty garbage bags, which I expected to prove insufficiently capacious for the ransacking we had planned.

‘What took you so long?’ Truman fretted when I walked in. ‘I don’t see how you can bear that rat’s nest. And I thought you always say he’s so boring.’

‘Mordecai is endlessly entertaining, if often at his own expense,’ I said.
‘Anyway, you’re just in time for a walk down memory lane.’
‘Memory lane—’ I poked at a fibrillated rump steak on the counter that had freeze-dried to umber with a distinctive greenish cast ‘—in winter. Bloody hell, do we have to do this now?’
‘That’s what you’ve said all week.’ Truman prised a tupperware container from the upper shelf with the crowbar he’d marshalled for the job. “‘Feta walnut pâté”,’ he read out. ‘Corlis—when did you make that?’
‘Ten years ago.’
I was not hyperbolizing; I meant ten years ago. When he prised off the lid, the frost had grown high and interlaced, reminiscent of that remarkable green fungus which had thrived on the yellow squash. He plonked it in the bag.
‘But that’s my
good feta
and
walnut
dip!’ I exclaimed, once more the imitation too true for comfort. ‘You’re
not
going to
throw
it
away
!’
‘Gross,’ said Averil, exploring another corpse in cling-film. ‘Is this fish, or fibreglass?’
‘Three important heels of bread from 1977,’ Truman announced,
kerchunk
.
‘That would make
perfectly good
french toast!’ I cried.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Truman groaned, fingers grown ruddy. ‘Rice and cheese balls!’
I had helped my mother with a party, when? I must have been at UNC at Chapel Hill, and we’d rashly multiplied a recipe so fecund that the rice balls seemed to reproduce of their own accord, as if by cell division. Poor Truman ate those gluey fried dumplings for weeks—but not, it seemed, all of them. The second shelf was devoted entirely to neat packages of icy brown orbs, nesting nefariously like an invasion of aliens waiting to hatch. Just then I had a brief nightmarish vision of what might happen to our house if we allowed the undead to enter the room-temperature dimension. I cautioned Truman he should cart these bags to the kerb before their contents began crawling up the stairs to our beds, tongues of unnaturally preserved lasagne noodles trailing crenulated worms along the carpet.
‘A quarter cup of chilli con carne, 1974…’ Truman rooted. ‘One half hot cross bun—’
‘The Easter rising,’ I said. ‘1916.’
‘One ball pie dough scraps, one dollop leftover carrot cake icing, and—what’s this—
salmon surprise
.’
‘You know what she did, don’t you,’ I explained to Averil. ‘When some yummy titbit in the fridge was turning to science fair project? Normal people throw it out, Mother put it in the freezer.’
‘She believed in cryogenics,’ Truman posited. ‘Maybe she was hoping that over the years they’d come up with a cure for cancerous casseroles.’
‘In the later years it became obsessive,’ I went on, taking over while Truman breathed on his stiff red hands. ‘They lived to freeze. A prune cake would barely cool before Mother was wrapping it happily into little squares and nudging them maniacally by the egg whites. Egg whites…Egg whites…Egg whites…’ I threw four successive plastic containers into the first bag, now full.
‘I’m going to toss this,’ said Truman, tying it up. ‘I swear this bag was starting to move.’
When he returned we were down to the serious archaeological back layers, which had melded into a solid wall of petrified leftovers, the kind of Arctic dig in which you discover missing evolutionary links. Troom hoisted the crowbar again. ‘Corlis,’ he enquired offhandedly, using a hammer on the crowbar to chink the gooseberry crumble my mother only made once—when I was in tenth grade. ‘What happened, at Mortadello’s?’
‘Oh, a lot of bitching about the ACLU, of course. Funny, too—most Yippie sons would be carping that their fathers
didn’t
leave bequests to bastions of social justice. You can’t win.’
‘Uh-huh. And that’s what you told him?’
I shrugged and picked shrivelled peas from the floor. ‘More or less.’
‘What about the house?’ asked Averil squarely. ‘Will he let us buy him out, or not?’
‘Ah—’ I was getting very thorough about the peas. ‘Not exactly.’
Truman hit the crowbar again with the hammer, hard, and a glacier of clam chowder gave way. ‘What do you mean, “not exactly”?’
‘I guess I mean—’ I scooped some frost from the floorboards. ‘No. He won’t. He’s going ahead with that partition suit.’
‘What the heck!’ A chunk of cooked frozen oatmeal skidded across the floor.
‘Would you watch what you’re doing with that crowbar? I think you need an acetylene torch.’
‘But why?’
I muttered, ‘Mordecai’s more complicated than you think.’
I took over from Truman so he could thaw again. Spanish noodles, pork barbecue, lamb curry—all my old favourite dishes had paled to the same morbid mauve. This was Mother’s idea of preservation?
‘All he’s ever cared about is money. What’s complicated?’
I noted with some surprise myself, ‘He’s sentimental.’
‘Mother and Father didn’t like him, I don’t like him, and you don’t like him, do you?
Do
you?’
In the crook of the freezer door, I was physically in a corner. ‘Not much.’ I qualified tentatively, ‘I guess.’
‘So what’s to be sentimental about?’
‘I did what I could, OK? The fact is, if the house goes on the market there’s a chance the price will go higher than the appraiser’s valuation and Mordecai knows that. Yes, he wants his money, but he wants as much of it as possible. That’s why he’ll force us to advertise, and it’s not my fault!’ I had made all this up on the spot.
‘OK, OK—then why are you so mad?’
I had started hacking at the ice mural of dinners we didn’t finish and hadn’t enjoyed much the first time, wondering if the
impulse wasn’t to save most what you never really had in the first place. The montage of my motley childhood was in this layer so welded and blurred and twisted with interweaving plastic wrap failing to protect tuna bakes from the ravages of salvation that none of the dishes was recognizable any longer, or distinguishable from one another—just one big gunky smorgasbord of keeping elbows off the table and wanting to go play. Oh, she’d saved all right, but saved what? A life of freezing. That was what my mother did. She froze.
If I was angry at being jammed once more between two brothers, at that very moment I was furious with the woman who lodged me there. Like the sponge, this freezer was a point of view. Beyond rice-andcheese balls, my parents had stored their courtship by the ice cubes, wedged their lives together and their first kiss between the chopped spinach and desiccated chuck steak, so that at the end of this project I half expected to find the two of them embraced over stiff slices of pumpkin pie. For my parents had not been brave enough to live in a world of spoilage and catastrophe, decline and obsolescence. Their marriage was in the freezer. Their versions of their children—The Bulldozer, The Scatterbrain, The Tender Flower—were in the freezer. The world itself—where grown children now have sex and drink ‘the hard stuff’, but not in their house—was in the freezer. The fixed tenets of HeckAndrews—that we Loved Each Other, that we had a Happy Family—were in the freezer. So I was angry over ten-year-old feta walnut pâté because I’d have preferred warm-blooded parents who had rows and fell out instead of a couple rigidly holding hands like the top of a wedding cake preserved for eternity by the family-pack pork.
‘You know,’ said Averil, retrieving a casualty and sniffing, ‘this might still be all right—’
I grabbed the pinkish chunk and hurled it back in the sack. ‘Don’t even think about it.’ Averil didn’t have the constitution for this work.

Eugenia Hadley Hamill met Sturges Harcourt McCrea when she was twentyone at a Young Democrats conference in Richmond, Virginia. He was President and she was Secretary—too perfect, for 1952. Loosely speaking, she remained his secretary for the duration, dutifully remembering appointments while the Great
Man championed racial justice. (How appropriate that my father never appeared for a plaintiff in a sex discrimination case.) That there was never any question of equality between my parents probably made the relationship possible.

Initially, her looks would have nearly evened the balance with her husband—my mother was stunning. My father received flattering lambastes in conservative papers, but my mother got salesmen falling all over themselves to be helpful when she bought a hat. She sported generous hips, but a tiny waist and neat, close breasts. Over the years her knees got a little bulgy, but otherwise her legs were solid, and she had trim, diminutive feet. Her skin was a warm olive that didn’t sunburn, which I inherited, while Truman was stuck with my father’s freckling hairless white-bread complexion that seared and peeled with a vengeance. Only Mordecai, however, got her hair—a thick and lustrous mahogany like the pricey woods he favoured, with a natural curl and tendency to form ringlets around the temples after a light sweat. Mordecai bound that hair tightly away, but Eugenia Hamill had made the most of being a brunette, sweeping shocks back from her forehead where they would tendril free from hairpins down her neck.

Most riveting of all, of course, was her face. Even in crinkled old photographs she radiated with a smile like an open window, and chocolate eyes that simmered in the light, twin pots of dark fudge glistening on a stove. Mordecai got those, too—her firstborn was treated to the whole package, so that when the second and third came along it was as if there was less left for us genetically. But in my older brother those eyes had a muddier, more conniving stir, less like fudge sauce than brownie batter. They were flatter and more suspicious, and when they went pellucid it was never with desire but always with self-pity. Even in my mother’s eyes you found a popple of mischief before she married, which by the way completely disappeared. All that churchgoing and oatmeal-freezing is hard on mischief.

In that animal way some women have, at twentyone Eugenia Hamill marked my father as a male destined for the head of the herd. You’d have needed an eye for it, since I couldn’t see anything auspicious about him in their wedding pictures. My father at twentyfive was a geek. He may have been president of the Young Democrats, but he cut his hair barbarously short so his
ears stuck out from his head. Acne. He looked gawky and awkward, no chest, and the features in his face had not yet settled; they didn’t seem to know where to be, as if at a reception where they weren’t sure how to mingle and kept wandering off for a glass of Hawaiian punch. Were you stuck at cocktail hour with Mr Sincerity here, first of all he wouldn’t drink; and second, he wouldn’t let go, but would corner you to dissect Adlai Stevenson’s strategy for derailing McCarthy while everyone else was swooning about James Dean and tapping their toes to Chubby Checker. He wouldn’t dance, or remember jokes. The fact is, if I met my own father at a party I’d have ditched him in a minute for the guy with a sense of humour and a martini on the other side of the room.

My father may have been a swat, but even then—this is what my mother spotted—he must have been driven by a ruthless personal ambition that he disguised decorously, and with timely creativity, as burning social conscience. Their first few dates were spent picketing lunch counters, or leafleting for integrated education and then fishing their discarded handouts from black cotton Virginian mud. To give Sturges credit, with a woman from the midwest for whom the segregated South was the evil empire, a diner with Whites Only restrooms was a much more inspired locale to get her to clutch his hand than in the back rows of
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman
.

My father must have had some cachet, a stalwart lefty in the days when it cost you, who had taken two years off after a history degree at Davidson to volunteer for—ever the sacred cow—the ACLU. Meanwhile he threw himself into the election campaign that so broke his heart that Truman Adlai had it to thank for his middle name. Anti-McCarthy, anti-nuclear testing, later to troop after Martin Luther King and help found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Sturges McCrea was in on the ground floor of all the noble sentiments that are now derisively dismissed as ‘politically correct’. My brothers may have resented their father’s staking claim to the big liberal issues not just because these were used to bludgeon the boys into submission, but because so little largesse was left for them. Truman did not champion the black and the poor but porch mouldings; Mordecai had thrown in his lot with high fidelity of only the most technical variety. If Eugenia Hadley Hamill had met either of her own sons at a
Young Democrats conference, after politely permitting Truman to regale her about the distinguishing elements of Second Empire architecture, and Mordecai to extol the components of his last recording studio, she’d have politely excused herself for finger sandwiches, leaving them both to goon mournfully after her as had so many young men in her youth.

I do not question that falling in love with Sturges McCrea was the biggest event in my mother’s life. Before Sturges, she had tolerated countless suitors, gracious and considerate of their feelings, though firmly offended when their hands crept over her knee. But I figure when Sturges so much as grazed her blouse she couldn’t breathe. My mother must have had a libido the size of South Dakota; though virgins when they married, for years after they were so self-congratulatory over their restraint that there must have been a fair fire to contain. They were apart during much of their courtship, hailing from different states, and she lived for his letters—stiff, formal protestations of undying love with a lot of God thrown in that we were still unearthing around the house. That his prose was stilted my mother no doubt overlooked, sweeping to her bedroom and throwing herself on the bed to hoard his onionskin as she would later stockpile Vidalias until they were black. The door locked behind her, she would pen a reply in that liquid, Palmer-method script of hers that made even ‘ketchup’ and ‘light bulbs’ look exotic magneted to the refrigerator door when I was young.