Truman had worked up a vigorous hostility to Tom Wheeler, so when my brother opened the door I saw a superior satisfaction cross his features that the appraiser was fat. The man’s dress sense matched ours: thin baggy suit, lavender tie. ‘This guy’s a hayseed,’ Truman whispered to me in the foyer, the assumption being that anyone that overweight couldn’t be clued up about architecture.
Truman was arch, his offer of coffee stiff and more graciously 84
declined. Wheeler said he would get right to work, thank you, and we trailed after him as he began touring our mansion with a notebook. In the parlour, he tripped over our splayed Britannicas while ogling the cornice. He ran his finger through my clay to reveal the mantle’s marble.
‘Looks like the maid hasn’t been through here in a while,’ he said mildly.
‘Mother isn’t around to make us clean our rooms any more,’ said Truman.
I slouched on the couch, which we’d bunched with army blankets, assuming a slatternly sprawl but failing to distract him from examining the window frames—which were now, thanks to Truman, tightly puttied around nineteenth-century panes.
In the kitchen, Wheeler cooed over the porcelain sink with its perpen-dicular X-shaped faucets, and the tacked tin countertop, which far from considered inconveniences were now retro-chic. He nudged away Truman’s bread crust and examined the oak flooring, reaching for the sponge to dab off the mustard.
As Wheeler caressed our black walnut banisters, Truman despaired up after him. ‘It’s an awfully old house—falling apart really. No one’s maintained it for some time. My parents weren’t fixer-upper types.’
‘She looks like a solid old girl to me!’ When he tickled a gargoyle on the landing, I thought Truman might slap his hand.
Wheeler proceeded to my room, where the stained knickers made less of an impression than the stained glass window. Another note.
‘Original fireplaces!’ he exclaimed.
‘I guess,’ Truman grumbled. We’d bunched mine full of my mother’s used Kleenex.
‘They draw?’
‘No, they’re totally stuffed up!’
He worked the flu back and forth—oiled—and gawked up the clean brick. ‘Looks good to me.’
At the entrance to the dovecot Truman waylaid, ‘That’s just storage, you know. Junk.’ But Mother’s key was in the door, and Wheeler proceeded up the refinished stairs, to where Truman’s uglification job had been the most half-hearted.
‘Separate apartment,’ he noted. ‘Raises the value considerably.’ We peered up as he ascended the spiral staircase to the tower deck, from which he surveyed downtown Raleigh with such a big 85
breath and pat on his chest you’d think he was on the top of the World Trade Center.
I had never seen Truman nearly so jealous over a man’s coming on to his wife as he was over the appraiser’s swooning at his house. With Truman always a step behind him, eyes following Wheeler’s hands, the appraiser assumed a teasing little smile, and delivered a lascivious performance. He ambled back downstairs, stroking and mauling every inset tile and voluted sconce as if feeling up a skirt, and jiggling outside with such a proprietary swagger that I half expected him to ask for a cigar and highball. Circling the outside of Heck-Andrews the man had a field day, wolf-whistling at the buttress-flanked dormer windows, palpating pilasters and engaged balustrades on the bays, retreating out on to the front walk to leer over the attractive alternation of rectangular and imbricated tiles on the mansard roof. He sucked back a burble of drool to commend the ornamentation of the hoodmoulds in the four circular windows piercing Truman’s tower; spittle webbed his mouth.
‘Pity about the missing corbels,’ Wheeler hummed sadly, ‘but they could be replaced.’
On the porch the man gorged himself, cupping the bulbous turned balusters like breasts, fingering up the chamfered posts to fondle the faceted panels and decorative studs, patting the door’s surround from ramp to backbend to fleur-de-lis.
‘One of the old panes is out,’ Truman noted, but by this time his intrusions were lacklustre.
‘Congratulations,’ Wheeler announced when he was through. ‘You’re sitting on a gold mine.’
Bollocks.
When they shook Truman’s hand was limp. ‘Sorry to put you to so much trouble,’ Wheeler winked. ‘Hell of a project, cleaning that up.’
I sensed we were amateurs.
The official appraisal arrived two days later: $410,000, and Wheeler included a note saying he wouldn’t be surprised if we could get half a million bucks. The valuation was inconvenient, it would cost us, but at the same time I could tell Truman felt proud. He swept the clay, hoovered the flour and smoothed the bedding, in the affectionate repossession with which a gentleman takes a woman’s arm after she has been insulted by the attentions of strangers.
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As for my grandstand—about how our father had the right to give his money to charity, how we deserved nothing, how inheritance is
‘evil’—I never retracted it. Frankly, I had learned not only these magis-terial sentiments from my father, but also how to use them as a cudgel.
It’s true that our generation was strong on uncertainties—we didn’t believe in God, were embarrassed by our country, and had even flirted with right-wing departures from the Democratic Party. There was a price to pay for sand under our feet, and though I am not sure I would trade for the pavement on which my parents stood—or thought they stood—I could be envious of the illusion. Sturges McCrea had a way of making both his sons feel dilute, and he might have encouraged them instead to feel akin. Our father did have principles. Granted, he also had hypocrisies—he was officially a democrat and personally a dem-agogue—but you have to have standards in the first place to fail to live up to them.
Though I don’t recall his discussing the subject, my father probably would have looked askance at inherited wealth, though he would also, like a normal parent, have wished to leave something to his children—he did. I doubt he ever considered bequeathing the whole of his modest estate to the Fourth Child. It was devious of me to deploy Truman’s inheritance to part him from it.
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7
I was accustomed to running messages from Heck-Andrews to Mordecai’s Basement; for years the only sparse communication between my parents and their eldest was through me. I would be sent with their forlorn invitation to Easter Sunday’s leg of lamb, and though I’d know the answer beforehand I’d leap at the pretext. My parents would be nervous on my account, as if sending me into an uncharted and perilous country from which they themselves were banished, and they always looked relieved when I returned seemingly unscathed.
Then, I was a double agent. At sixteen, I would slink into the Basement and report how last week our mother thought a ‘hooker’ was
‘someone who hooked people on drugs,’ and we’d hoot. On return home, I’d share my dismay that Mordecai had killed half a bottle of cognac in a sitting. I was everybody’s friend.
As a girl I had adored escaping to my older brother’s burrow, so when I took on the mission to appeal to him to settle the house partition out of court the eagerness returned. I had never lost my awe of this brother. Historically, I was perfidious—I got away with things, but I lied. Mordecai, however, had flaunted the very indiscretions I concealed.
Craning over the banisters, I’d gawked at my brother in the foyer as he shouted at my mother for all the neighbourhood to hear that she
‘couldn’t tell him what to do with his own cock’. Cock! He said cock!
He hadn’t disposed of gin bottles in next-door’s rubbish, but baldly upended them in our kitchen bin. He didn’t slip condoms in a sleeve of his wallet, but tossed them on his desk or, if used, in an unflushed commode. Once the eldest cut and run, Truman and I still had to be in bed by ten o’clock while Mordecai was living with two older women and shagging them both at the same time.
The reason we were given that Mordecai became so unruly was 88
that
our older brother was a genius. When at fourteen Mordecai took an intelligence test at NC State, he scored upwards of 160, in the range my parents informed us was ‘immeasurable’. My father often bemoaned that his eldest was ‘too intelligent for his own good’—the poor guy.
Meanwhile, neither of Mordecai’s successors was pegged as an intellectual powerhouse. My nickname was The Scatterbrain, since I often forgot my lunchbox, and no one thought to connect these amnesias with the days my mother packed ketchup and bologna sandwiches.
Truman was christened The Tender Flower, as he cried a lot and was easily wilted. Surely recourse to Mordecai’s IQ was pure parental conceit—if Mordecai was unmanageable because he was brilliant, their genes were redeemed and their parenthood absolved. I can spot the self-interest as an adult; as kids we took our labels at face value. We believed that Mordecai was brainier than we were, and genius exempted him from the don’t-cuss/don’t-drink/don’t-fuck rules that continued to apply to us mental mortals.
If curse, hooch and nookie seem the lesser seditions of the time, rebelling against my father in the Sixties was problematic. Other Raleigh-ites were blessed with proper flag-waving dads, dedicated Nixonians who wanted the niggrahs kept in their place and the Vietnam War to go on forever. These fortunate sons had strengthening family rows over whether they marched on Washington or cut their hair. But my father’s attitude towards Mordecai’s sprouting pigtails was rueful. A delegate for Eugene McCarthy in the Chicago convention of ’68, my father encouraged Mordecai to march on Washington, and threatened to come along. In retrospect, it’s surprising that my obtuse brother didn’t take to burning crosses on our own Oakwood lawn.
Instead, at nineteen Mordecai built a shrine under the Franklin Street post office to a whole aspect of reality my father abhorred: the physical world. While Mordecai stockpiled every drill and sander he could lay hands on, my father despised and abused mechanisms of any kind.
Technology expressed its animosity in return: chainsaws sputtered in his hands; two laptops in a row exploded. On winter mornings when the Volvo wouldn’t start, Truman took to commanding my father to get out of the car and to step back three feet, at which point, for Truman, the station wagon turned over like a charm.
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My father felt superior to objects and refused to stoop to their level.
As a result, he was always putting the wrong oil in the lawnmower or savaging the gearbox in the Volvo with a ruthless, careless arrogance he sometimes transferred to his children. He would botch plastering drywall because he regarded himself as above drywall, though the plaster always got the last laugh. My father was an ambitious, wilful man used to getting his own way, and this showed in his strong-arming of the inanimate. People, in fact, were easier to push around; the objects fought back. I’m sure that’s why he didn’t like them.
What’s more, he was mistrustful of anything that wasn’t instilled with qualities of good and evil. He delighted in proclaiming a machine
‘poorly designed’ (i.e. he just broke it), because that meant it was bad.
But most things just are. They may be predestined for obsolescence, but not heaven or hell. It was no accident that my father became a judge, for when denied the power to praise or upbraid he felt helplessly irrelevant. Finding a whole three-dimensional universe outside his jurisdic-tion must have been horrifying.
My mother, by contrast, had an uncanny mechanical knack, and in the absence of my brothers would cajole my father away from his jammed typewriter, to fiddle with frequent success. She understandably identified with the inert, manipulated by its master, whose only capacity to resist resided in its passive inability to comprehend what was required of it.
Though dubbed The Bulldozer by my parents at an early age, Mordecai more than any of us had an instinctive grasp of lawn-mowers that must have come from thinking from the inside, where my father would simply attack from without in blind, bigoted ignorance. Had Mordecai brought to his three marriages the same gentleness and intuition with which I had seen him tinker lovingly with his table saw, no woman no matter how crazy would have ever walked out. If relations to objects are at all evocative of relations to people, then Mordecai was naturally compassionate where my father was a brute.
I skipped Krispey Kreme and turned down Franklin Street, where the bumpers of Mordecai’s army truck delineated the stumpy contour I associated with my brother. Everything he owned was thick and blunt; his suitcases were heavy-gauge aluminium with rounded corners, his three-mil leather boots had
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dull reinforced toes, so that bluntness is a physical shape I associate with stubbornness, resistance and relentless, ploughing aggression.
One of his inventions was ‘wooden pillows’, two of which he’d given my parents for watching TV: great slabs of laminated oak with routered edges. Only Mordecai the Obdurate would think to make pillows out of wood.
As I skirted the truck down the drive, my pulse girlishly quickened, and I reminded myself I need no longer be so bowled over by my older brother’s job as a small businessman. The shine might have gone off his colourful rebellions against my parents as well—mutiny against tee-totallers had been too easy and had gone too far. In his rejection of formal education, he was left defending a Swiss-cheese version of the world with the same preachiness of the father he overthrew. And while twenty years ago they’d seemed worldly with their Spartan mumbles, Yeah, Mort, sure, Mort, cool Mort, the truth was a lot of his friends were morons.
None of this prophylactic deflation went anywhere. I was visiting my big brother. My brother, the genius.
The door was open; I wandered in. My eyes took a moment to adjust.
The sun was glaring outside, but no ray no matter how determined ever infiltrated this space. There were only two windows near the ceiling, their black curtains sealed with duct tape.
The Basement’s sleeping quarters were relegated to a cramped corner of the floorplan. I ducked under its maroon drape to check if he was still in bed. It was, after all, only five in the afternoon.
‘Mordecai?’
Quietly, I switched on the lava lamp, churning the matted shag with lurid red eddies. There were no windows in here at all, so the same air had recycled for two decades, thick with what seemed to be the pun-gency of dirty sheets. I knew better—Mordecai didn’t own sheets. This outer room housed his office; the lamp illuminated rows of audio catalogues. Decibelle’s crimson logo gleamed on his invoices: a sketch of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon captioned, ‘Nothing’s impossible, just expensive.’ An Iron Butterfly poster drooped off its Blu-tack, but as for ornament that was it; Mordecai’s idea of decor was embodied in the ocean of off-white plastic beneath Inna-Godda-Da-Vida that constituted his exorbitant Compaq computer drafting package.
The beaded curtain to his bedroom had abandoned all 91
pretence of privacy, missing more strings than it retained, but Mordecai was not a prudish man. More than once I had heard grunting, glimpsed swatches of dark hair, as I suspect I was intended to.
‘MK! Slide me over some one-by-fours, will ya?’
From behind the drape I heard metal echo, a saw shriek—he was up.
As a teenager, I used to tempt my brother’s hirelings sidling in in tight cut-offs. They all had ponytails and low-riding jeans slung on lean hips, a scraggle of belly hair exposed through missing buttons. They wore wire-rims and amulets and puzzle rings; they ate carob bars and yoghurt raisins, or tahini-tofu pitta pockets with sprouts. Perspiration infused the thongs at their necks until the leather was slick and dense with a funk that still permeated my brother’s Basement. The astringency of those men—a few years older than I, men who fasted, threw the IChing, and popped mescaline as casually as I might chew the bit of paper that wouldn’t peel off my Tootsie Roll—the boggy pong of their brackish Birkinstocks and sharp weedy breath had steeped this whole warren. Their residue mingled with the mildew from Mordecai’s bare mattress and mould spores rising from discarded coffee cups, with
the singe of grinding metal, the char of drill-bits blackening good wood, the sting of hot oil.
I loved this cavern in summer, with the sealed cool air of a wine cellar, cement cold on my bare feet as Mordecai ritually rebuked me that the floor was rife with nails. Now in December the heat exhaled from an open duct overhead, breathing down my neck as I crossed the work-space. Sawdust caught in my nose hairs, and I couldn’t quite sneeze.
‘Core!’
Three seedy employees looked up. The heavy one winked. I may not have quite the figure I once did, but my brother is still proud when I stop by. Around Mordecai I am impressionable, acquiescent, soft.
Around Truman I am caustic, canny, imperious. They have completely different sisters.
‘Mort, you want this threaded?’
‘Yeah, but for 1.2 cm and no more. If you can’t get it exact, call me over; that rod’s $3.80 a foot. Dix! Get my sister a drink, will ya?—For Chrissake, Wilcox, never operate that saw without the guard down!’
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I enjoyed being ignored. I savoured my brother’s self-importance.
‘How ya’ doin’, girl?’ Dix slapped me on the shoulder.
Of Mordecai’s wives, Dix Ridelle was my favourite. I hoped he kept her. She was a carpenter by trade; her overalls swung with ball-peens and screwdrivers. A chipped front tooth gave her a pawky, tomboy grin, and her sandy hair was cropped as if she hacked it off herself with a razor blade. When they first married, she was tall and lanky, with sinewy arms and shoulders hard as oranges. I supposed she was still tall. But after putting in four years of overtime with my brother, even overalls couldn’t hide the extra weight. Dix was turning yellow.
‘Hanging in there,’ I said, and collapsed in what passed for their kitchen. No wiener-cooker or bagel-slicer here. The blender hadn’t a top, and if you didn’t remember to put a plate over the strawberry daiquiris the nook took a blood bath. Often they hadn’t, on the third batch, and the wall was mapped in these oversights, Rorschached with splurts of coffee-ground tomato sauce left on high, and Jasper-Johnsed from mustard jars that just missed Mordecai’s head. Uncrimped aluminium containers littered the counter from month-old Indian take-aways. Few of the dishes matched; all of them were filthy. I needn’t open the fridge to confirm it contained three six-packs and half a bottle of hot lime pickle.