she is lovely.
I nodded at the stand in the hall. “It’s still there.”
“Yep,” said Truman, pressing his lips like my mother.
Mother’s pocketbook always rested on this doorside table, where it continued to rest, clasped, reposed like a body in a casket. I knew what was inside: a tin of Sucrets gone sticky, the medicine she didn’t take for her heart, and a vast crumple of multi-ply re-used Kleenex pressed with pink lipstick. When we sniffled in church, she would hand us a damp tatter; repelled, we’d snort the mucus down our throats.
“You should cancel the credit cards,” I advised.
I delivered duties to my brother as privileges. For the funeral ten days earlier, I had allowed him to buy the cold cuts and to ring her colleagues at the hospice. This was the kind of graciousness in which I specialized.
We drifted to the formal parlor, though traditionally we’d have preferred the sitting room opposite, a less pompous environment with the TV and torn Naugahyde sofas that was comfortably messy. Some solemnity had entered these proceedings which I didn’t know how to kick. I felt polite.
“My whole life,” said Truman, in his minor key, “I’ve been taught not to go into Mother’s purse without asking. Pawing through her wallet doesn’t come easily.”
Truman fetched us glasses of wine, and I scanned the parlor, no longer milling with Raleigh’s community leaders, hands on my shoulder assuring me what a good woman my mother had been, how deeply committed my father had been to civil rights, and all the while me squirming at their touch, not feeling flattered even on my parents’ account and hoping that when I died no one called me “good”—though considering what I had just left behind me in London, there was little danger of that.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do with all this junk,” said Averil.
At least she was candid. However laborious the task of cluttering such vast floor space, my parents had undertaken the chore with some success. With no less than twenty-four rooms in this house, it was substantially over-furnished. The parlor, for example, was fat with low-riding Danish modern. If Truman is to be believed, my parents did not understand (I would say, did not even like) their own house, and were always fighting its retrograde nature and trying to haul it wholesale into the twentieth century, where, according to Truman, Heck-Andrews not only did not belong but refused to go. Thus none of their “improvements” would take—when my father repapered the upstairs hall with purple peonies, the panels curled to the baseboards that same night. When they splurged on shag for the sitting room, none of the carpet tacks would stay in the floor. I claimed their additions didn’t adhere because my father was a do-it-yourself incompetent—his glue was too thin and he used the wrong nails. Truman, one of the last great anthropomorphizers, was convinced that the house itself had revolted, moulting loud wallpaper and shuddering tatty shag from her boards.
As for the “junk” of which Averil despaired, my parents had been avid travelers, favoring countries with anguishing social ailments: South Africa, Burma, Korea, where they would meet with pastors just out of prison, dissidents running underground presses, and Amnesty International task forces. Somewhere in all that hand-wringing over human rights they’d found time to shop, for this room was busy with been-to bric-a-brac: Namibian carvings, Korean celadon, hand-painted Russian dolls, while the walls were smattered with a mismatch of Japanese sumi birdlife, Indonesian batiks and Masai ceremonial masks.
“I suppose we can help ourselves,” I said. “Like a boot sale at the end of the day, and everything’s free.”
“I wish they’d taken this stuff with them,” said Truman glumly.
“The house, too?” I proposed. “Like Carrie.”
He glared. “How was the opening? Of your show?”
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