slipped and said that’s real nahce or stopped me from lying to Londoners that I was born in New York.
“Do you ever regret not studying architecture?” I asked my brother.
“Oh, not really.” He sighed. “I’d have been expected to design modern buildings, wouldn’t I? I only like the old ones. The last thing I’d want would be to goon up at the Bath Building and realize it’s partly my fault.”
“You and Prince Charles,” I said. “Ever miss the hardware truck?”
“Yes,” he said. “Often.”
After high school, Truman went through a “phase”—according to my father. Surely daunted by Sturges McCrea’s professional eminence and degree from Harvard Law, Truman decided to be, as he put it, “regular.” He refused to go to university. I had walked in on several prolix sessions in the parlor—not rows, they were civil—when I visited from Manhattan. Truman would be extolling the simple-honest-man and his simple-honest-job, for wasn’t it ordinary hard-working people who built this country …? My father would rub his chin with a smirk until Truman ran out of euphemisms for unskilled labor, then deliver his own monologue about the value of a liberal arts education and what a privilege it was to “luxuriate in the fields of the mind.”
For years Truman didn’t give in, and considering that I think of him as the family toady he deserves some credit for holding out so long. Truman drove deliveries for Ferguson’s Hardware for a decade. Averil’s father owned the store, and it was there they met; she worked the floor weekends while getting an education degree from NC State. Her father paid my brother execrably even after he became an in-law, though Truman received his fifteen-cent-an-hour raises with the same awed, unquestioning acceptance of divine intervention on his behalf as when his allowance went up to thirty cents from a quarter.
“I understood that job,” he explained. “I got to know the layout of the city the way you did London on your scooter, right? The truck was cosy. It was my truck. I played tapes and sang along and in the winter the heater kept it snug and in the summer I had air conditioning … And I always packed a swell lunch.”
I wanted to say, come on Truman, wasn’t it dull, didn’t you crave something challenging, I mean how can you retain so much affection for a bloody van, for Christ’s sake, but I stopped myself. I do not know why this so rarely occurs to me, but I remembered for once that my brother was not me.
“I thought you found philosophy stimulating.”
“It was okay at first. Lately … Well, you’d think that all those books about is there a God and the implications of mortality and do we have free will would be of some help, right, when your mother dies? If they’re not some kind of explanation or resort, what good are they?”
“Not much.”
“These airy-fairy philosophers are no use at all!” He waved his hands. “I find Mother downstairs one morning, do you think I was going to look up “Mothers: death” in an index? It’s just, Corlis, all these Great Questions, they don’t seem to have anything to do with my life. I used to feel ashamed of myself. I was afraid I wasn’t smart or serious enough to be edified by all that wordy pondering. But now I wonder if maybe I’m plugged in and it’s these cobwebbed old farts who haven’t a clue. When Dr. Chasson launches into the mind–body problem I sit in the back of the class remembering that tomorrow is Tuesday and it’s time to wheel the trash to the curb. But, you know, maybe garbage disposal is actually more important! For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis—I don’t care!”
“Huh,” I considered. “I guess I don’t either.”
“Most people don’t! All they care about,” he added grimly, “is being right.”
Truman had always been given to diatribes, and I found them wonderful.
We had crossed in front of Peace College, passed Krispey Kreme Donuts, and were now ambling down Person Street. Mordecai lived off Person Street, in a basement under the post office to our left, and as if to advertise this fact “Mordecai Florist” (no relation) blinked in neon on this block. Truman sped up; I lingered. I could feel a pulse here, a thrum up through my feet as if my brother’s Rockwell table saw rumbled the whole street; metal shrieked in the distance. Poking off the post office’s far wall, DECIBELLE, INC. swung on the plain black sign, and the back end of the army surplus troop transporter loomed up the slanted drive to the curb. I knew better, however, than to suggest we stop by. On the other hand, had Truman not wanted to risk running into his brother at all he could have eliminated Person from a stroll he took every day. An eccentric flirtation.
We reached a parking sign. We about-faced. We turned around here because he always turned here: the usual logic.
“If you’re so disaffected,” I said, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to be a professor,” he recited. To me, Truman’s assertion had the same color as his announcement in third grade: I’m-going-to-be-a-fireman.
“That would make Father happy,” I humored him.
“Father was always happy,” said Truman acidly. “He didn’t care what I did.”
“He spent an awful lot of time convincing you to go to college—”
“He just wanted to win.”
There seethed in both my brothers a resentment I didn’t quite share. Oh, I bore a few grudges—my father never fostered my artistic ambitions, for example. Though once exposed to the caprices of Soho I could see his dissuasions as protective, the charge that I was “no Michelangelo” when I was seventeen still stuck in my craw. He wasn’t an aesthetic troglodyte, either—he adored Rembrandt—but regarded art as a ministerial calling for which you must be God-chosen, and he hadn’t seen any angel Gabriel descending to my messy room. Wouldn’t I consider, he went on to propose, nursing? “Nurses are much in demand in the Peace Corps,” he commended. For years later I was tortured by visions of being stuck in some African mudhole in a peaked white cap.
After my stint in the Peace Corps I was meant to marry, end of story. Despite his lauding of the institution, in my father’s mind once I was boxed off to my wedding he planned to give me no more thought than the Christmas ornaments in his attic: I would be taken out once a year for ceremonial purposes, then restored to my carton. Failing his expectations was the best thing that could have happened to me. Never signed, sealed and delivered to some generic husband, I remained a person, one capable of the “adult conversation” my father had dreamed of. He delighted that I alone of his children shared his love of travel, and I don’t think he ever recovered from his incredulity that the girl of that lot was not, it turned out, a total idiot.
Yet both my brothers fumed, as if denied entry to the garden. They had tried different routes—Mordecai by beating his own path there, through brambles of his making: he’d no formal education past half of ninth grade, and taught himself to wire a mixing board under a bare bulb with a diagram. Just as furiously as my father had given it away, Mordecai had thrown himself into making pots of money, and spending even more. He would earn my father’s respect by doing everything the hard way and anything he wasn’t supposed to. But my father was an authoritarian by nature, and would never reward misbehavior; didn’t, to his grave.
But he wouldn’t reward good behavior, either. He never took Truman seriously, even when his youngest capitulated and enrolled in Duke, even when Truman gave up on majoring in architecture because my father chided that while a “reput-able” calling it was not one in which you’d “make a moral difference.” My father must have known his younger son would adopt properly sublime aspirations eventually because Truman was like that. The youngest had wiped the table and done his homework; he made As and when he wanted to have sex on a regular basis he got married. Surely it was as a very consequence of this obedience that my father dismissed him, leading me to the disconcerting conclusion that parents don’t really want you to do what they say.
My brothers’ ire was not even slightly mitigated by the fact that their father was dead. If anything they were