We were notified the will was out of probate. Hugh had expedited the title search and asset liquidation, I hoped, out of consideration for the fact that Truman and I were skint, but I later suspected extra pressure was brought to bear from a third party known since a colicky infancy for getting his way and fast. The Fourth Child, however, was still not paid off, and Hugh had received another letter, pointedly less polite, demanding the legacy be resolved. Smug in its assurance of our father’s favour, the ACLU was the spoiled and peevish sort of sibling all children detest.
The very next day the doorbell rang. It was 19 December.
A functionary pumped my hand. Bobbing in an ocean of navy polysester, he flapped his papers and grinned as if I had just won the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes. That’s North Carolina for you—even a Wake County Sheriff comes on like your long lost buddy.
‘Troo-man!’ I sang up the stairwell, capturing the infuriating gaity with which my mother had roused her sullen children for Sunday school. ‘We have a visitor!’
Truman was not by nature well disposed towards strangers of any kind. I had suggested to him that everyone starts out a stranger; if you don’t get past that hurdle you don’t make friends ever, but then that was Truman, he didn’t make friends, ever. He could be so warm and garrulous, I didn’t understand how he’d gotten through all of high school, a ten-year job whose only conceivable redemption was chatting up clients, and five semesters of university without once bringing anyone home. I think he was scared other people wouldn’t like him and so beat them to it by disliking them first. This particular yuletide pop-by was unlikely to break him of the habit.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘This is Mr Benson, Troom. He’s a—?’
‘Process-server. Just need you two to John Hancock these here papers, and then I’ll run them back to the courthouse. Won’t take but a jiff.’
‘Would you like to come in?’
Truman gloomed.
I drew Benson into the parlour. ‘Does this have to do with the probate?’
‘No, ma’am. A Mr, ah—’ he checked his folder—‘Mordecai D. McCrea is filing suit for partition. These forms here are just a formality. Say you’ve been served and know to appear at the hearing and all. Nothing to get het up about.’
‘What if we don’t sign?’ Truman jutted his chin.
Benson looked embarrassed. ‘That’d just put me to the trouble of writing out an affidavit swearing you’ve been served. Somebody must have connections, though. Court’s backed up to kingdom come, but ya’ll’s hearing’s next week. Twenty-fourth.’
‘We have a hearing on Christmas Eve?’ asked Truman.
‘Just another day, where I work. Get Christmas off, New Year’s, that’s it.’
‘Maybe you could show us where—?’ I asked.
The sheriff spread his documents on the coffee table.
‘You don’t have to be so damned cooperative,’ Truman growled.
‘Well it’s not his fault, is it?’ I whispered back.
‘Say, ya’ll aren’t related to Sturges McCrea, are you?’
‘A.k.a. Dad.’ I smiled; Truman rolled his eyes.
‘Heckuva guy. That explains how this moved up on the docket. Terrible shame about that accident. Can’t say I agreed with him on that bussing folderol—caused more trouble than it was worth and now it’s the African Americans putting up a stink about riding across town. But Sturges start in a direction, he keep going, yessir.’
‘That’s for sure,’ I said, thinking Benson could as well be describing my older brother. I added to Truman, ‘Wouldn’t even stop at a Texaco.’
‘Texaco invest in South Africa or something?’ Benson gaped at the cornice and chandelier. ‘Never would have pictured Sturges McCrea in a place like this.’
‘Sturges McCrea didn’t picture himself in a place like this either. Mammy’s out back making Scarlett a dress out of drapes, but we try to keep the tenant farmers’ jump-down-turn-around-pick-a-bale-of-cotton sotto voce so the neighbours don’t complain.’
‘Old-fashioned and the dickens to heat, I bet. But this house is a prize, it is.’
That’s exactly what Heck-Andrews was, a prize. But I had not yet discerned whether the reward was for the best behaviour or the worst, nor if it had any real value or was merely an oversized trophy.
‘Sign here, and here, too…You sure don’t have much of a tar-heel accent, do you, miss?’
Having established my paternity, I couldn’t pull off English origins this time. ‘I never did, much,’ I said.
‘Sure you didn’t, Corlis,’ said Truman. His signature was a jagged scribble; his capital C tore the page.
‘You two have a merry Christmas now—’
‘How likely is that?’ said Mr Friendly.
Benson had decided to leave, and I think he made the right decision. The veins in Truman’s temples were beginning to pulse. ‘Take care now. Gotta scoot.’
‘This is ridiculous!’ Truman shouted when the man was gone. ‘Why is this going to court?’
For once I didn’t quiet him with collusive disparagement of Mordecai’s character by concurring that our brother was a bully and simply wanted to watch us cower and scramble to keep our ancestral home. I had some dawning appreciation for why Mordecai would bring the ownership of this house to a head, for when I considered telling Truman right then, Troom, I know you and I have talked about buying this house together, but I’m not sure that would be the best thing for you and…(I’d have sounded so unpersuasive already, like such a shyster, and he would stop me and say what do you mean Corlis, and I would stutter…) Truman, I’ve talked to Mordecai about maybe buying the house with him instead, and you and Averil could—Gentle as he seemed, I had a feeling that Truman was wholly capable of socking me in the jaw.
So I let Truman fume and said nothing of the sort. And Mordecai was right, I’d have put off opening my mouth to this effect for months, for years, forever. Often as I might have railed that I was born in the middle and it wasn’t fair, much as I might have resented both my brothers for forcing me before I was old enough to understand the choice to pick one of them over the other, the middle was where I was stuck, again. I could not have both pie and ice cream, but instinctively I would take my pie and sneak the ice cream. I had always been like that. I was still like that.
My inclination with law was to duck it, though this evasion did not consistently translate into a life of crime. I preferred bicycles and scooters over cars, since the cops overlooked lesser transport, whereas an auto, with its attendant registration, insurance and driver’s licence, entangled its owner in jurisprudence. Yet once on a bicycle, I stopped for lights and gave way at zebra crossings. Being an ex-pat had appealed because, while technically subject to British laws, they were not my laws; especially with no National Insurance number I felt out of their reach, a sensation on which I placed high value even with no plans to break them. For several years I paid the IRS more than I needed, having instructed my accountant that at any cost he must fictionalize a filing that wouldn’t be scrutinized. My sole ambition with law was to slip out from under it. Hence I would never, myself, have filed a partition suit, thereby flying into the very web I went out of my way to avoid.
However, on 24 December Mordecai’s nonchalant slump in the courtroom displayed the plumped lying-in-wait, not of the fly, but of the spider. He had arrived before us with uncharacteristic punctuality. Lolling on his bench with arms extended on either side, ignoring the armed bailiff when the man tapped his head to warn my brother to remove his hard-hat, Mordecai clearly saw the law as a weapon to wield or to defy, either of which he would do with zeal and in plain view. Mordecai regarded a courtroom as part of his inheritance and therefore as one more thing he might help himself to, like a celadon vase. Or this is the only way I could explain how a hippie anachronism in pigtails who was probably packing at least an ounce of dope at the time could slouch amidst all those uniforms in so relaxed and proprietary a fashion.
When I trailed into the court after Truman and Averil, Mordecai waved me over to the seat beside him. Refusing toso much as nod, Truman selected a pew two rows behind Mordecai, so I assumed the empty one between them. That my inability to sit in public incontrovertibly by either left me sitting by myself I might have taken as cautionary.
The case was before a single judge. Our verdict’s dependence on the caprices of one man was all too evocative of my family, and it discouraged me when the larger world was as arbitrary as the small—there was no resort. Judge Harville had an immobile, deadpan face with stiff grey hair that moved like a solid object when he looked down at his files. His languid, congenitally bored manner conveyed that after thousands of picayune disputes paraded before his bench nothing fazed him any more. He kept his voice a level plainsong, except at the end of sentences where they pitched, like Truman’s, in a minor key. Yet while my brother’s voice fell a half step, keening a tune of tragedy and defeat, Harville’s rose a half, lifting with a satiric little jest. From a distance at least, I got the impression Harville saw his job preponderantly as farce.
‘Docket number 92-P648,’ announced the clerk. ‘McCrea vs. McCrea.’
Truman and I made way in the aisle for the blue-maned, blue-faced biddy who had failed to prove her hairdresser’s negligence in placing a standing ashtray in the path between the dryers and the ladies’ loo; when Truman tripped on her outstretched crutch she was elaborately huffy. We sat up at the left side of the court, where we were joined by a striking young man whose dark, drastic features suggested Sephardic parentage, though his surname, murmured hurriedly as he sat beside us, was Anglo enough: Grover. Truman sniffed, and worked his chair another few inches from the larcenous do-gooder. When I whispered that David Grover was pretty sexy, Truman’s face curdled as if I had just confessed to a crush on Radovan Karadzic.
Mordecai swung behind the table on the right. My older brother was in his usual caked black jeans and lace-up boots, with bits of plaster clotting his eyebrows. He was joined by a lawyer whose attire was proper only in the most technical sense. The attorney’s tie was wrenched aside; his suit jacket arms were shoved up his wrists, while his white shirt showed a tad of tail. Since they couldn’t make a rule against it, he seemed to have bad skin on purpose. The lawyer lounged in his chair, savvy and familiar. As he chuckled with Mordecai, I wondered if he’d taken the case on contingency or just for laughs.
It was Truman’s idea that we needn’t hire counsel, though we had rung Hugh, who said he was too closely connected to the case and begged off. Truman figured that since we were in the right we might as well speak for ourselves. I suspected our error, but kept my misgivings to myself. In retrospect, I’d advise prospective defendants that sanctimony makes for weak representation at best.
‘Mr McCrea,’ Judge Harville began, addressing Mordecai. ‘Remove your hat, please.’
‘Sure thing, your honour,’ he underscored, with the same knife-twist he’d used when deploying the address with my father. Mordecai’s release of the chinstrap was leisurely.
‘And there is no smoking in this courtroom.’
‘Righty ho,’ said Mordecai, tucking his Bambus back in his leather vest pocket and adding convivially, ‘hard times for us retrogrades.’
‘This is a courtroom, not a pool hall. Mr Shipley?’ Harville sounded so fatigued I thought he might collapse. ‘Exit the chewing gum.’
Mordecai’s lawyer snapped a tiny bubble before picking the wad from between his teeth and jamming it under the table.
‘Mr McCrea, can you explain to me why you have brought this matter to our court? Could you not resolve what to do with 309 Blount Street between you and your siblings?’
Mordecai lunged to the podium in front of his table, flipping a pigtail as he rose. He gripped the lectern and weighed on his elbows, tipping the podium on to its forward edge. ‘My brother refuses to put the house up for sale, which ties up over $100,000 of my money. I run my own company, and am currently under financial duress. Meanwhile he claims he lives there, and won’t move out.’
‘Can your brother not compensate you for your share in the equity, then?’
‘He doesn’t have the cash,’ said Mordecai bluntly.
‘We do too,’ Truman whispered fiercely beside me.
‘You are Mr Truman McCrea, sir?’
‘Uh, yes, yes I am—your honour.’
‘Step up to the podium please?’
Truman stumbled to the lectern. While on the opposite side Mordecai had assumed the planted, squinty-eyed try-and-make-me stance from which he had refused to turn down the volume of Three Dog Night, Truman shoved his hands in his suit pockets and drew his shoulders together just as he would have hunched in our kitchen doorway delaying the inevitable relinquishment of his duplicate key.
‘Do you have the financial resources to retain this property by yourself?’
‘No, but—’ Truman looked back at me. ‘With my sister—’
‘Do the two of you have those resources?’
‘No,’ I intervened from the table. ‘I’m afraid we don’t.’
‘This is cut and dried then—’
‘Your honour!’ Truman pleaded. ‘We were going to take out a mortgage. Sir.’
‘You have arranged a mortgage?’
‘How could we? He filed this suit the day the will was out of probate! The fact is, we made him an offer, and he turned it down!’
‘If it may please the court,’ intruded Shipley wryly, though neither he nor his client had gone out of their way so far to please anyone, ‘The offer so made was spurious, sir, the money was not at hand. For the record, the junior Mr McCrea is an undergraduate at Duke University, with no income aside from a recent inheritance too slight to purchase my client’s share of the property. His wife is a part-time substitute teacher in the Raleigh public school system, with an income, if my research serves me, of $10,000 a year. I would submit that no banker in his right mind would give such an individual a mortgage of fifty cents.’
‘They would, too, with a half-million dollar house as security—!’ Truman’s voice was cracking.
‘Which raises another of our contentions,’ Shipley proceeded. ‘The property’s assessor has shared with my client that he substantially undervalued the real estate, by perhaps as much as $100,000. We have that in writing, sir.’ He passed a paper to the judge, who refused it with a laboured wave of the hand.
‘This court cannot weigh the credit-worthiness of prospective mortgage applicants. We are not a savings and loan. To bar partition, I need written proof that the respondent can buy out the petitioner. Mr—Grover…’ Harville shuffled paper with weary confusion. ‘You are representing—the American Civil Liberties Union? I fail to see whose first amendment rights have been trampled here.’
‘Mine,’ grumbled Truman.
‘If I may explain, your honour,’ said Grover easily. ‘The property was willed in equal parts to the three heirs and the ACLU; my organization is tenant in common of 309 Blount Street.’
‘Who would write a will like that?’ Harville supposed.
‘Justice Sturges McCrea, sir.’
‘Typical,’ grunted the judge, and added without looking up, ‘Seems to me you nosy parkers stir up enough trouble without being encouraged.’
‘I beg your honour’s pardon, what was that?’ enquired Grover. ‘For the record?’
‘Never you mind, Mr Grover.’ Harville whinnied, resuming his dreary professionalism. ‘And how is the ACLU disposed in this dispute?’
‘It is naturally in our interests that the property be liquidated. The ACLU has no resistance to this suit; in fact, we are eager to disentangle a charitable bequest from domestic politics that are none of our affair.’
Looking stranded at the podium—no one had told him to sit down—Truman smote David Grover with an evil eye. ‘Why don’t you sit over there?’ he muttered, nodding towards Mordecai. Grover had no choice but to sit on our side of the court, but having him in our dugout was like hunkering down with a teammate whose uniform was the wrong colour.
‘Ms McCrea.’ Harville turned to me. ‘What are your wishes in this matter?’
My heartbeat doubled. ‘I’m neutral, your honour.’
‘Would you not prefer to reap the proceeds of a sale?’
‘I guess I’d like to see the house stay in the family, sir.’
‘So you’re not neutral.’
‘I guess not, sir.’
‘But you do not have the funds to purchase the house, even with your brother?’
I was grateful he didn’t say with which brother. ‘Not quite, sir.’
Harville shook his head in disgust, obviously ready to knock off for Christmas Eve with his own dysfunctional family.
‘309 Blount Street,’ he intoned, ‘is to be publicly advertised for auction, proceeds to be divided equally among the four parties. Bids to be due February 5, 1993—that gives you six weeks. Should any one party or combination of parties raise the funds in that time, you are within your rights to participate in the auction yourselves. I might add, Mr Shipley, that a materially identical course of action was available without judicial assistance, and there was no excuse for wasting the state of North Carolina’s time with this case.’ The gavel fell. We were excused.
I mumbled to Mordecai as we left the building, ‘I guess you’re not still coming for Christmas Eve dinner, right?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world!’ He slammed me on the shoulder to lumber off with his sleazoid lawyer, leaving me slack-jawed.
I shouldn’t have been incredulous. While I was an avid voyeur—having acquired a taste for watching spit fly by eavesdropping on argy bargy from our landing—I preferred an eye on the storm to the eye of it. Like it or not, I resembled my mother in more than countenance; unless pushed to the wall she, too, would smooth over family cracks with pastry. Outside discrete bouts of hysteria, my mother did not believe in conflict, that there was such a thing. All enmity was misunderstanding; improve communication and everyone eats pie. I did believe in conflict enough to avoid it. Mordecai, by contrast, adored nothing better than a pretext to hurl crockery. I’ve wondered if our difference wasn’t so much appetite for battle, one of us peace-loving, the other a warrior, for I became paralytically bored when stuck among softies who all ploddingly got along. Perhaps what differentiated our eagerness to enter the ring was the degree to which we were convinced we could win. If Mordecai stirred things up because he was sure to do more damage than have damage done, I envied him.
So, doomed to Momism, Christmas Eve I found myself in the kitchen peeling spuds for potato salad, all of us about to kill each other while I debated mayonnaise versus sour cream.
Truman was slicing Smithfield ham into the translucent slices tradition demanded. His brow was boiling, his lips were compressed. His wide forearm was flecked with the same once-blonde curls of my own hair, glinting with bygone gold. Often I barely recognized this meaty grown man as the fragile four-year-old who had stacked wood-blocks in our carriage house only for me to knock them down. Other times I recognized him more profoundly than any other child in the family. Despite the long string of failed Christmas Eves in this house, he would sliver yet another mound of exactingly thin Virginia ham in the naïve expectation that this time would be different, just as he had erected yet another playroom folly convinced, like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, that for once I would leave it standing.
With blocks or Lego, Truman hadn’t constructed phallic towers, but wombish houses, like a girl. There was, if I looked closely, a touch of the feminine about him still, maybe what all that weightlifting in his eyrie was meant to disguise. Truman’s improbable guilelessness, at thirty-one, tempted me to knock it down. Fleetingly, I relished telling him that the future of Heck-Andrews had a Plan B.
Averil was stuffing holly-cornered napkins into rings carved with Santa’s elves. She was wearing red and green. The kitchen was a disaster, and for what? I wondered how we’d bought into this myth of occasion, my mother’s ‘special times’. All this hustle-bustle, only to wrap the leftovers in cling-film, waiting to spoil so we could put them in the freezer.
‘I thought you hated potato salad,’ I mentioned at the sink.
‘Yep.’
‘Then why are we having it?’
‘Search me.’
‘…Do you like Smithfield ham?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Then why are we bothering?’
‘Search me.’ He’d decimated a third of the ham. He seemed to enjoy cutting too much.
‘Don’t you think that’s enough?’
‘Fine.’ He glared with a tight grisly smile, the knife raised point up.
‘I guess we should have arranged some financing before showing up at that hearing.’ My eyes met only those of the potatoes; my peeling was meticulous.
‘I guess we should have.’
‘You’re the one who didn’t want to hire a lawyer. I assume that’s the first thing he’d have advised us, OK?’
‘Too late now,’ Truman clipped. ‘Hindsight’s about as useful as looking up your ass.’
I eased the cork from a cabernet.
Truman looked askance. ‘At six o’clock?’
‘It’s Christmas Eve!’
‘There’s always some excuse.’
‘For a drink? In this house? You bet.’
‘You’re drinking more than you used to, Corlis.’
‘We both are, we didn’t used to drink.’ Which staggered me. I’d no idea how I managed my whole childhood without a bracer. ‘What’s biting your bum?’
‘Besides the fact that my brother just made me look like a complete twit in public? Maybe I’m reminiscing.’ I was relieved, though we’d more than enough sliced, when he applied the knife back to the ham. ‘About last year.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Yeah. You said that at the time. You were sorry.’
By and large, I was prone to the indolent emotions. I’d drop by if I was in the neighbourhood; I’d buy friends a little something, but only if there was a shop on the way. I was comfortably regretful when it was too late to remedy an oversight. I did whatever I wanted on the assumption that I could patch things up after. I was cavalier; I was sorry.
‘Troom, how was I to know Mother would have a heart attack? She wasn’t very old. Right, people can always die on you but you can’t twiddle your whole life in the sitting room waiting for some member of the family to expire.’ Well, of course you could; one of us had.
‘Uh-huh. But you’re home for Christmas this year. Now that she’s dead.’
He hadn’t let go of the knife. I whittled too many potatoes, reflecting that my little brother had all the makings of a serial killer.
‘Maybe better late than…’
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Maybe not better late.’
‘I couldn’t afford—’
‘Mother said that she offered to pay for your ticket. And you said no.’
‘I finance my own—’
‘You’re not too proud to take it now, though. Inheritance may be “evil”, but you’ll accept her money when it doesn’t mean you have to put up with her company for a day or two.’
‘I visited when I could.’
‘You’d be out every night of a five-day stay. You’d apologize, of course. Think she didn’t twig, Corlis?’
‘All right.’ I tossed a potato in the sink. ‘Did you enjoy earnest evenings with Mother? Be honest.’
‘Of course not, and that’s the point!’ He threw down the knife at last. ‘Do you realize what it was like here last year? Mother had volunteered to pay your fare, and you said you’d rather spend the holiday with your flatmates. Did Mordecai stop by? When he lived ten blocks away? Not one phone call! So Averil and I went out and spent three hundred dollars on a bunch of presents she didn’t need because no one else bought her anything. You didn’t, did you, not even a little package of shortbread or a souvenir from Buckingham Palace. She’d have been touched by trash, Corlis, some stupid trinket. You didn’t even send a decent letter, did you? A postcard! Which arrived, as I recall, in the middle of January.’
‘The end of January,’ Averil contributed.
‘So we spent last Christmas Eve looking at slides of their travels with Mother’s voice quavering, getting so puddly she couldn’t focus and the ten million shots of ANC worthies kept wobbling into blurs. We heard, again, about how they met in the Young Democrats and how respected Father was and how Jesse Jackson came to his funeral. We made her dinner and cleaned up and wouldn’t let her help, though that was mostly to get away for at least a few minutes, which didn’t work because while I was sudsing glasses she’d droop over my shoulders and thank me for being the one kid who seemed to care and she’d cry. I may have wanted to hit her, but I didn’t hit her, did I? You hit her.’ Truman was hyperventilating.
‘I had friends and a career and I lived in another country! That’s what parents bargain for. They do not expect you to stay home until you’re fifty-five, making repairs to the stoop.’
‘Then what are you doing now? Except I don’t notice you making repairs to the stoop.’
‘I’m taking a little time to work out what to do next. Considering you wasted ten years driving a bloody hardware truck in circles for your in-laws while you decided what to do with your life, I think I’ve earned a few weeks of slack. That is, if you have decided. If studying philosophy isn’t more navel-gazing procrastination. Fucking hell, you’re one to talk.’
That did him. I was regretful—I was sorry. He looked at his big hands with his shoulders slumped. I was glad I could still make him cry. ‘I thought—’ His chest lurched. ‘Christmas was hard, Corlis. I was tired, she was driving me crazy. I thought you might come home for me. You didn’t bother. All you cared about was your boyfriends.’
Despite the plural dig, I said, ‘I am sorry, Truman,’ and this time the apology felt different; I meant it. ‘Now—’ I poured him a medicinal glass of wine, ‘—Mordecai will arrive any minute. Get this down you, and then some. You’ll need it.’
Truman had not swilled nearly enough antidote when the kitchen table trembled as a military motor gunned outside. Mordecai managed to drive a vehicle that actually sounded like a bulldozer.
When he clumped in the back door with three of his workmen in tow, I noticed that his manner had altered. Ordinarily he had acted detached here, the avuncular visitor, but now he waltzed in with a feudal swag just like my father after a long day, who would slide his briefcase on the table and make for the freezer, to shovel ice cream straight from the carton before dinner. Mordecai now walked in this house as if, well, as if he owned it.
‘Yo, you guys got something to drink?’
I scanned all four of them, and felt a little economic sinking that not one of them had arrived with a bottle of anything. Mordecai beelined for the cabernet on the counter, grabbed a gas-war tumbler, and upended the bottle. His roll-up bobbed and shed ash as he talked. Meanwhile his minions ambled through the first floor, poking into closets and picking up knickknacks, as if considering whether to tuck them in an inside pocket. ‘Hey, Mort, some crib,’ the one with the dingy blonde ponytail murmured. ‘Not bad.’ I felt the impulse to count our silver, like some hapless Civil War widow when a Northern general occupied her vanquished house for bivouac. I expect Sherman didn’t arrive with any wine either.
‘Where’s Dix?’ I asked as Mordecai helped himself to ham.
‘Spending the holidays with her snit,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘They were getting on so good, it seemed a shame to part them.’
‘What’s she upset about?’
Mordecai flicked his head in Truman’s direction. ‘Later.’
God forbid with the three of us together that anyone would confide anything to anyone. It may have been a luxury of a sort to be the centre of information, for each brother told me his side of things so long as the other was out of range, but as a consequence they left me full of secrets and turned me into a liar with both. Maybe that was the idea.
Mordecai having left home so early, I’d had little experience with the two of them in the same room. Since I assumed a radically different persona with each brother, they cancelled me out. Not only did I not know what to say, but how to say it. With Truman, my speech was distinctly British—I said ‘controversy’ and used a ‘spanner’; with Mordecai, I fell in with his yahoo singsong, and said ‘fuck’ a lot. In Truman’s company, I was careful not to drink to excess, never admitted I sometimes smoked a cigarette, wouldn’t be caught dead nibbling biscuits between meals, and curtailed stories of sexual antics in the interest of portraying myself as a passionate woman with high standards just looking for love. Slumming with Mordecai, I tried manfully to keep up my end of a bottle, name-dropped multiple boyfriends, and snickered knowingly at any reference to pharmaceuticals, never letting on that I’d only taken acid once. Therefore when Mordecai thumped his muddy boots on the table, rolled a joint and passed it to me I froze. With Truman, I claimed I didn’t smoke dope; with Mordecai, I had never refused a few hits. I compromised with a single drag and handed it back. Truman raised his eyebrows. I fled for ham.
Mordecai and his three grungy employees reached across one another for slabs of Smithfield, ignoring the holly napkins to wipe mustard on their sleeves. Bandying brands of audio manufacturers, they glugged great tumblers of Rosemont cabernet until in short order they’d decimated a third of our case.
We were never formally introduced, but I sorted out the names of our gate-crashers. MK was the smarmy blonde, whose ponytail hung stiff with a lacquerous sheen. His weight was cadaverously low, his face dappled with the purple undertone of volcanic acne in his youth. MK’s drawl overplayed the dumb hick: gosh-dang ain’t that sump’m. I figured him for one of those lowlifes who was always trading on a southerner’s reputed buffoonery—sweet corn to divert attention from the switch-blade taped to his ankle.
When he followed me once to the sink—to get a glass of water he failed to drink—he may have been locating our case of wine. He said, ‘Is it true, Corrie Lou, that Mort took a test at NC State that proved he was a genius?’
‘So I’ve been told,’ I said coldly. I noted MK had mail-ordered my brother’s exact same style of leather boots, as he also rolled his own cigarettes and extolled that sickening caraway schnapps. Imitation made me edgy; it was a kind of theft.
“Cause that guy sure do run rings around me,’ MK twanged. ‘Half the time, I can’t tell what he’s gassin’ about from the man in the moon.’ Somehow I didn’t believe that MK felt all that stupid.
Wilcox was the tall lantern-jawed fellow who didn’t say much, though that left his mouth the freer to suck down drink. His head swivelled, following the others’ chatter as they segued from speaker components to the US Marines’ recent invasion of Somalia, but his pupils were inert and opaque. Wilcox looked like one of those kids in the back of the class who maintained an attentive expression, but if you called on him he’d sputter about the Revolutionary War when the class had long ago moved on to algebra.
Big Dave was the cut-up of the bunch, an amiable porker with a shameless guffaw. Maybe it was the granny glasses, but he seemed quicker than the other two and, more appealing still, I thought Big Dave liked my brother. When he chortled he seemed to have got the joke, where the other two laughed late, waiting for their cue. Big Dave was physically familiar, gripping Mordecai’s forearm, but even this boisterous prole knew his limits and when Mordecai looked down at the hand Big Dave lifted it with a simpering grin. The whole trio demurred to excess and their good-timeyness felt forced, making me wonder whether Mordecai could be forbidding outside his family as well as in. I overheard Wilcox mumble to MK to ‘keep an eye on Mort’ because ‘you know that fucker’s a mean drunk’.
Under-breath asides as MK and Wilcox left in tandem for the loo confirmed that what they said in and out of my brother’s earshot was chalk and cheese—hear any more about fucking Somalia I’m gonna…fucking skinny niggers, who gives a…Mordecai reared back as if his workmen were hanging on his every word, but I thought that their real concentration was on the potato salad.
While they helped themselves to our dinner and uncorked new bottles without asking, not one of them bothered with niceties like making conversation with Truman and Averil. Typically, no one had mentioned the hearing that afternoon, least of all Truman, who pulled his chair two feet outside the circle and said absolutely nothing.
MK asked about the folks their boss ‘got this place from’—these three seemed under the impression that Heck-Andrews was Mordecai’s alone. Though my brother described his father as an overbearing knee-jerk liberal, he went on to detail several landmark cases his father had tried, until it hit me like an anvil flattening Elmer Fudd: Mordecai was boasting! About his father! Then, MK couldn’t have cared less, his eyes only following his employer’s spliff as it stabbed the air for emphasis and failed to circulate around the table.
‘You know, if either of you guys needs some extra dough,’ Mordecai finally addressed his siblings, ‘this contract’s got us pressed. You’re pretty handy with a hammer, ain’tcha kid?’
Truman shrugged.
‘I pay fifteen bucks an hour. Think about it. And Core, I could use a hand in the office. Invoices, typing up bids?’
I looked at him in stupefaction. ‘You want me to be your secretary?’
‘Of course not, Core! You’d be my executive assistant.’
Having ravaged most of the food, Mordecai screeched his chair out and clomped off to the parlour, bottles in the crook of each arm luring his threesome along with him. Behind him, the table was strewn with potato dribs and half-gnawed carrot sticks, the floor tacky with flattened ham fat. Truman stayed behind to clean up.
That set the rest of the night: each brother in a different room. I kept excusing myself to the kitchen to fetch another cabernet where I would dawdle and dry glasses, drifting back to the parlour where Mordecai had put on Pearl Jam at a volume that would have broken another window in the door if our father were still alive. In neither room was I relaxed. After ten minutes I was acutely conscious of having left one brother for too long and began to fidget. Finally I gave up on trying to please both and no doubt pleasing neither, curling anti-socially in a far corner of the parlour. The music was too loud to talk anyway, so I amused myself by flipping a photo album that lay flat on a shelf in the absence of Britannicas.
I’ve wondered if personal memory hasn’t been fundamentally subverted by photography. These crinkled snapshots objectified a past that would otherwise have remained a revisable blur. For example, when I remembered those years, I didn’t envisage being a child. I may have recalled the sensation of not being wholly in control of my destiny, but I couldn’t picture myself two feet high. Yet look: I was tiny, smothered in lacy frills that would repel me now, my arms spread with their Vienna sausage fingers groping at the air to embrace a world of which I have grown so much warier since. Photos were a corruption, however. That I did not remember feeling physically small had a truth to it. I’d noticed as well the seductive tendency to replace the quiver of real recollection with the steadied camera. I conjured my mother flat and artificially touched up at her college graduation, an event that I couldn’t remember because I wasn’t born then: photographs.
They did, however, have their uses, and though I was well familiar with this album I turned its leaves this time round as if consulting an oracle. I may have been a little stoned, but my questions were two: why was Truman terrified of his brother, and why did Mordecai revile him?
In the first four leaves, there is no Truman: Mordecai in our Hi-Flier wagon, holding the handle with two-year-old Corrie Lou between his legs. Here he already wears that signature smirk; by five, he has learned the f-word. I, on the other hand, am unrecognizable: decked in flounces, bouncing with blonde ringlets, gawking up at big brother with ga-ga adoration. He is about to go plummeting recklessly down the hill, and I haven’t a care. My eyes are glad and uncomplex, without duplicity. Corlis Louise, dumb but happy.
More of these: Mordecai galloping with his baby sister on his back, bundling her on his sled for the scant two-inch snowfall on Bloodworth Street, the runners bound to scrape tarmac the second time down—snow in Raleigh is exotic, precious. Mordecai my protector escorts me, without my mother, to my first day of school.
The next leaf: my mother with fuller breasts, posing in front of the rental Tudor that preceded Heck-Andrews, a formless bundle in her arms. Mordecai is clutching me to his thigh, and averting his head with his eyes closed as if to say: this couldn’t be happening.
In the following two panels Mordecai grips his sister with resolute possessiveness, plying her with stuffed bunnies, crayon portraits, bugs under jars. The third of our number is no more included in the drama of the moment than shirt cardboard. In Pullen Park, Truman fists his mother’s skirt and ducks in its folds as Mordecai, confident, tall and commanding in comparison, pushes my swing.
I had puzzled over these early shots of Truman before. All small children appear bruisable and undefended, but in Truman these qualities are extreme: his eyes are watery blue, large for his face and too wide open; his lips are parted, his hands held from his sides, wafting as if he doesn’t know what they are for. He looks lost, the other two children colluding behind him, and his innocence is the kind that draws torment as irresistibly as flowers draw bees. These were the days of my first clear memories, when Mordecai and I would follow the toddler about the house ridiculing his first attempts at speech, exaggerating his mistakes; small wonder the little boy went mute for days.
Still there must have been an afternoon that I refused to participate in the game, though I do not remember it. When, instead of mimicking, ‘Doh-nnn! Weave me awone!’ in unison with Mordecai, stooping to leer into Truman’s face as he flapped his arms in the hand-me-down jacket that was still too big for him, I snapped, ‘Quit it, Mordecai,’ put a hand on Truman’s waist-high shoulder, and lent him my model palomino. There must have been an afternoon when, after school, instead of ritually threading down to the basement to peer at Mordecai’s latest stink bomb experiment I searched out the four-year-old back from nursery school, still struck dumb from having spent the entire morning at West Raleigh Presbyterian in a corner with his blanket. An afternoon when instead of hiding the ‘bembet’ one more time in the couch cushions I helped him look for it.
For with a single turn of a page the groupings of our threesome transform—and one construction we never find here is the three of us playing convivially in the sandbox together. No, suddenly I am filling Truman’s pail, edging forward to balance his seesaw, ketchuping his hotdog. These photos already capture the inseparable quality for which among my cousins we were renowned. And this is the first point in the album I recognize my own face. Its lines have sharpened and thinned; my eyes glitter with the quicksilver of a sovereign sibling. I am no longer a gurgly little sister; I am myself a protector, though in the way of most protectors, also the one you need protection from. We do what I say; we do not do what I proscribe, and Truman accepts both punishment and reward with equal submission because he has never stopped being grateful.
Truman was still grateful for my defection. That very evening, when I would pop back to the kitchen he didn’t look censorious but beholden. Likewise, I concluded as I looked up from the album at Mordecai puffing away on his rollie, eyes cutting in my direction to make sure I had not abandoned him for the galley, my elder brother had never stopped being aggrieved.
You could see it in the photos. Often, in the later shots, Mordecai is out of the picture altogether. When he appears at all, he is remote from the rest of the family, sucking on candy cigarettes, looking daggers at his sister and her new-found sidekick. (In a single intimate exception, Mordecai is holding his little brother’s waist as the youngest dangles on a jungle gym, but there’s more than a hint in both Mordecai’s sly grin and Truman’s expression of abject horror that Mordecai is considering letting go.) Far at the edge of the frames, his eyes are slit with calculating resentment, as if he is plotting revenge, biding his time while he contrives the ultimate stratagem to win his sister back. When I glanced over at him in my father’s old chair, boots on my mother’s flimsy coffee table, knocking back our cabernet and casting about the parlour with an air of fresh reclamation, I realized that Mordecai was still scheming; he had not given up.
It had never occurred to me that my desertion might have hurt Mordecai’s feelings. There was humility in my blindness—I never imagined I was that important to him—and admiration as well; he was my big brother, absorbed in pulley systems ingeniously driven by Erector Set motors, or nose down in his dinosaur book. Why would he covet the plaguesome curiosity of a little girl? For in my memory, Mordecai was sufficiently invincible that he didn’t have feelings.
The other puzzle I hadn’t fitted together was not only why I was forced to choose one brother over the other, but why I had selected the younger one. Was I naturally maternal? Did Truman’s unguarded blue pupils cry out for my safekeeping? Or had I merely revealed a preference for the role of capricious leader over cowed fan? Did I only opt for Truman so I could boss him around? Or did I perhaps—like him better?
Whatever the answers, the consequences of our childhood alliances and betrayals were still playing themselves out in this household, so that one more time I would have to decide with which brother to throw in my lot. I slammed the book shut, having at least satisfied this much: Mordecai reviled his brother because the little twerp had swiped his sister, and Truman trembled because anything capable of being stolen can be taken back.