A Perfectly Good Family Read Free Page A

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