A Perfectly Good Family (27 page)

  At Karen's, the sign about jacket and tie did not, apparently, apply to my brother; I knew of no rule to which Mordecai did not regard himself as an exception. The maitre d' looked happy to see him, though only when the bill arrived would I realize why. Mordecai didn't wait to be escorted, but lumbered to his 'regular' table in the corner, where a chilled double of aquavit had arrived before he sat down.

  'We'll keep you taken care of, Mort,' the waiter whispered, and my brother beamed at the schnapps. I was not sure I wanted Mordecai taken care of all that well.

  I stuck with wine, and pulled at the silk under my thighs so it wouldn't wrinkle from nervous sweat. I liked wearing dresses sometimes, but they could have a dismal effect on my personality. Mordecai already made me timid, and the dress clinched it. In a skirt I grew demure; I scissored my legs where I was more given in jeans to prop an ankle on the other knee, like my father. Though I usually bantered with waiters, 'gussied up' I seemed to think 'that sounds terribly tasty' in response to the specials was enough—I traded in my wit for looking pretty.

  I nodded. 'No hard-hat. This must be a special time.'

  I twirled my wine stem, and surveyed the restaurant. Karen's

had low-lit billiard-green and white-linen decor, its hushed tuxedoed waiters gliding between tables as if on casters. Its curiously conspiratorial atmosphere was enhanced by a mural covering the far wall, in which outsized diners lifted champagne flutes to mythical triumph. The women in the painting bulged from skimpy black dresses; meant to appear voluptuous, they looked puffy. Their bow ties choking too high on the neck, the men seemed desperate to get home to flannel plaid. Rosy brush strokes in cheekbones, intending the high colour of good cheer, instead evoked over-indulgence. Smiles were stiff, eyes vacant, and even in the mural waiters leaned towards one another, collusive. Surely the commission was designed to present clientele with a picture of themselves as chic, glossy, urbane, but the artist had depicted the reverse: a crowd of trussed up tar-heels dining in a dreary shopping centre of the American hinterlands; they would just as soon be tucking into a Roy Rogers quarter-pounder as veal piccante. It was a painting about fraud.

  'So, how'd you like Clyde?' Mordecai polished off his double; a replacement appeared silently within five seconds.

  'I always wondered what happened to people like that, after school,' I said. 'The low-profile, undistinguished sorts. I guess they really do become accountants and bankers.'

  'Among other things, they marry your own brother.'

  'Was Dix a nerd?' I asked innocently.

  'I wasn't talking about Dix, and you know it,' he said sharply. 'For that matter, True himself was a nerd, wasn't he? His reports were on time, with nifty binders. You said yourself he had no friends. His room was neat.' For Mordecai, the only habit more damning than a well-kept room was legible handwriting.

  I had come out this evening having made a promise to myself, and I would soon find how difficult—how astonishingly difficult—it would be to keep. This constant sniping at one brother to placate the other was topping me up with unspeakable self-loathing. I would not, I swore, be enticed into whittling down my undefended little brother from salad to mints. So I curved the conversation, stalling while I came up with something brutally nice to say about Truman McCrea.

  'I'm always gobsmacked,' I said, 'by proles who doggedly execute those dumpy jobs. Grocery management, soap distribution, even work that pays—law, stock trading. They're welcome to the

money. I need shop-keepers and soap-sellers; they allow me my fringy, irresponsible life, and without them I guess I'd have to take that sodding job at Wachovia myself.'

  The latter section of my speech I hurried. Whenever I talked to Mordecai I heard a clock ticking; if I tried to tell him a whole story, I pared the details until it was boring—just what I was afraid of becoming. One of the most gracious privileges you can extend to others is permission to be dull; surely it is only when provided this relaxing latitude that most people will successfully amuse.

  Indeed, Mordecai had ignored my recitation in favour of the menu, and proceeded to order an excess of its most expensive dishes. Besides, he would not be wrested from his pet subject of the night, which if allowed he would worry like a vicious cat with a mouse that was already dead.

  'Maybe it's about time you explain to me how your brother and I could be biologically related,' he began, popping olives. 'Do you realize that every time I lay eyes on that henpecked asshole he's vacuuming the stairs?'

  'He likes order,' I submitted. 'And every time I lay eyes on you, you're spilling ashes on the stairs.'

  'Who gives a fuck, Core?' The second aquavit was beginning to take hold; his voice was louder, his accent more Southern.

  'Truman does. It's daunting, growing up as the youngest. Here's a little chaos theory for you: when everyone around you is more competent, more powerful, your universe is anarchic. Everything takes place out of your hands and over your head. So you have a neat room. It's a way of taking control.'

  'It's a way of wasting your fucking life dusting your fucking bureau.'

  My arbitration wasn't making a lot of headway.

  'You didn't grow up in anyone's shadow,' I persevered. 'You were free to invent yourself. By the time Truman was in first grade, you were already established as the family bright spark, and I'd cornered the market on creativity. What was left for Troom?'

  'Only the rest of the whole goddamned planet.'

  'That's not the way it seems, in a family. You didn't come of age thinking of yourself in terms of other people. Truman couldn't help but compare himself to us, because everyone else did. He

went to Martin, too, and had your teachers—they remembered you. Boy, did they ever remember you. Mrs Gordon failed Truman for the first half of a term before she figured out he was—'

  'A rabbit.'

  I took a breath, and stirred my arugula. 'I've always thought of you as courageous. Well, Truman is afraid. You remember how long it took him to give up that decrepit blanket, how long he sucked his thumb? How for hours at a time he'd go mum? Maybe you can call that a failing. Fine, it's a failing—'

  'I can see quailing from spiders, but that's not what we're talking about. Ever hear of pantophobia? That's the kid's problem. Fear of everything.'

  'But he was born that way, Mordecai; you can tell from his photographs. I'm not a hopeless determinist, but some traits of character are not our fault. I'm a little devious, and I was probably born that way, too; you were born stubborn. You were, according to Mother, an obstinate baby. Still, of the failings, isn't trepidation defensible, even rational, given what you know about the world? It's a ghastly place.'

  'It's a fucking riot, if you don't let it get on top of you. There's nothing about "the world" that makes everyone cower in the attic of their parents' house until they're twenty-whatever. Besides, what's the guy got to be afraid of?'

  'Walking into his own parlour and finding his mother dead, for starters.'

  'Cookies crumbling. Any day of the week you can walk into a room and find yourself dead.'

  Mordecai was subdued for a moment by the arrival of his carpaccio. He prided himself on his taste for raw meat.

  'I know you especially fault Truman for not leaving home,' I continued carefully, 'when you couldn't wait to get out, even if that meant flipping hamburgers at the Red Barn. But when you're the youngest you look at a family from the other end. You and I regarded our parents and Heck-Andrews as this big heavy immutable thing we had to get away from. But Truman watched us go, our parents get older. The youngest is clued up, actually. He knows that a family isn't some permanent burden but a tremulous and temporary coalescence, because the youngest is around to watch it fall apart. That makes you conservative. That makes you stay home, because you're afraid that if you turn your

back for a minute there won't be a home. And you're right. There won't be.'

  Visibly unmoved, Mordecai washed a clump of French bread down with schnapps. 'OK, so he's stayed in that house because if he stepped outside the bogeyman would get him, or the fucking thing would disappear. But sheer timorousness or "conservatism", as you call it, didn't necessitate that into old age he buy Mommy's groceries and mow the lawn. I can't believe that every youngest kid is such a snivelling, asslicking toady.'

  'So you never tried to earn your parents' approval?'

  'That's right.'

  'Get off it! Didn't you run home with that IQ test result that proved you're a genius? Didn't you leave your 100% Algebra II tests on the kitchen table? Even as an adult, weren't the only times you stopped by when you had a big contract coming in and you wanted to trot out those big figures, and didn't the fact that Father was never impressed by money drive you to distraction? For that matter, didn't you bring your girlfriends to your bedroom instead of taking them to a Motel 6 in order to make Mother jealous?'

  'There's a big difference—' He took a deep drag on his Three Castles, '—between expecting recognition for achievement, and wanting a pat on the head for obsequiousness.'

  'Truman wasn't obsequious, he was nice!'

  Our waiter cleared the starters and smoothed in the main course: for me, fish; for Mordecai, a thick black-and-blue fillet steak. I found the waiter's air of indifference feigned. I was sure they routinely eavesdropped on Mordecai's tirades, looked forward to the show even, while Mordecai was careful to give them one. I'd gone through twice as much wine as I would normally in less than an hour, and I, too, was getting rather loud.

  'Now that's a loser attribute if I ever heard one,' said Mordecai, sawing into the meat savagely and exposing flesh so red it was probably cold. 'Every screw-up ever lived was nice. That's just another way of saying your brother's a rabbit! Sure you're nice when you're afraid, otherwise somebody's gonna bite your head off.'

  'Aren't you glad he took care of Mother? Wasn't that better than her being all by herself, aren't you thankful—'

  'I thank my lucky stars it wasn't me, that's for sure.'

  'And Truman's been nice to me. Nicer than you by a mile. And kindness isn't a "loser attribute"; most losers are sour prats. The number of things Truman's done for me—'

  'When was the last time you asked me to do something for you, Core? When you were six years old.'

  I picked the bones from my haddock. 'My first day of school,' I said. 'You held my hand. I asked you.'

  Mordecai swabbed his meat juice with a fistful of bread, intently. 'You spent so much time with that kid, and I have tried to understand why, tried to figure what you saw in him I didn't, but I'm just flummoxed, Corrie Lou—I mean, where's that kid's spunk? Did he ever say no I will not go to church this Sunday, I don't believe in God? Did he ever shoplift a roll of lifesavers, has he ever been bad? Has he ever said fuck-you to anybody, Core? In his life?'

  'He's said fuck-you to you a few times.'

  'Not to my face he hasn't. And I would shake the guy's hand, I would! I would pay the little bastard money just to hear it!'

  I drummed my fingers. 'I doubt that. I doubt that extremely. And Truman did rebel, in his own quiet way, if that's what you're after. Father pooh-poohed Troom's interest in architecture to his dying day, but that never stopped Truman from campaigning against the beltway—'

  'What a cause, boy. A highway. Really something to get distraught over.'

  'See, you're just like Father. And Truman persisted despite that derision, which shows backbone. Besides which, to imitate you I'm afraid, he held off on going to university for years, under considerable duress.'

  'And what's he doing now?'

  'Paying his dues, I'll grant, trying to please Father when it's too late. But you don't realize—both Troom and I were told over and over how you'd made Mother's and Father's lives hell. From the time I was ten, we were drilled with how mortified they'd be if our teenage years proved just as horrific. Yes, our parents exaggerated their suffering out of self-pity, just like—' I was about to say, just like you do. 'But we were under a lot of pressure to be decent kids because you used up all the patience and forgiveness our entire generation had coming.'

  'They never forgave me an ever-loving thing.'

  That stopped me. No. They hadn't.

  'But what's with this house thing?' Mordecai mumbled through his steak. 'True talks about that house as if it's his fucking mother.'

  'Maybe to Truman,' I said, 'it is his mother. Or all he has left of her. You can't imagine it's just a building.'

  'It is to me.'

  'Oh, horseshit. You're going to tell me that the only reason out of all the houses in this town you've decided to try and buy Heck-Andrews is because it's a bargain or you need that many bedrooms? If so, you have the self-awareness of a flea.'

  'I'm not "trying", I am buying that house because I already own part of it and you own the other part and I happen to think you and me'd make a team.'

  'What if Truman didn't want it?'

  'What say?'

  'You heard me. What if Truman didn't want the house? What if it was an albatross to him, and he'd be thrilled for you to take it off his hands? Would you still want it then?'

  Mordecai smeared his mouth with a napkin and said, 'Sure,' indistinctly.

  I snorted. 'And Mother thought you were so smart.'

  The waiter cleared our entrées, mine barely touched. Here was dinner almost over and we'd only danced around our official agenda—typical McCrea evening. Mordecai must have assumed that if I stuck up for his brother I was preparing the way for no thank you, I'd prefer to live with Troom. In truth, far from it—I'd so rarely had a real conversation with Mordecai rather than serve as his cooperative, conveniently taciturn audience that this was the first time I thought, you know, I could live with my older brother.

  'Core,' Mordecai slurred, a fresh aquavit at elbow. 'I wish you'd just tell me yes or no, hey?'