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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.
