On a whim I took down my mother’s last grocery list, scrawled on old “Bob Scott for Governor” notepad paper and still magneted to the refrigerator door, and pulled a nubby pencil from a drawer. I had an itch to make my own calculations. The chart I constructed on the back of the list so amazed me that I wondered at having never drawn it up before:
By way of explication: every child has sooner or later to face down the farcical liberal fiction that his parents love each child equally well, a myth Sturges and Eugenia enshrined in their will, as if to convince themselves. Bullshit. Parents have favorites. Mine did their best to camouflage these preferences, my father by being indiscriminately aloof, my mother by being indiscriminately clingy. But as Sturges McCrea had himself opined, prejudice will out.
Hence my chart. If we counted the ACLU as the fourth child and allowed each parent to rank the McCrea kids on a preference scale from 1 to 4, we all four earned exactly five points. I had to admire the symmetry, contrived by two people neither mathematically minded and only egalitarian in an official sense. My father fought for justice his whole life, so naturally my parents would mete out love along with the real estate in equal portions.
Though Mordecai’s glass was beginning to sweat, I paused to study my handiwork. Unquestionably, the ACLU came first in my father’s affections; it did not wet the bed or require a ride to the school play when he planned to take the car. There was equally no question—and I say this in my mother’s defence—that however faithfully she parroted his views and encouraged his checks out the door, for my mother the ACLU straggled in a far fourth. She was incapable of getting exercised over progeny she couldn’t treat to a Popsicle, a ward who would never arrive at the back door trying to hide his report card or waving the winning essay on the school cafeteria. She was a real mother.
As for Truman, that of the warm-blooded kids he was the runner-up with both parents explained a doggedness in him, a we-try-harder, like Avis. If he could merely succeed in besting one sibling with each parent he could walk away with first prize. To this effect he had repaired their hot water heater, retacked their stair carpet, and rolled their wheely-bin to the bottom of the drive every Tuesday morning.
Yet my father’s choice of Truman over Mordecai betrayed his weaker side. Sturges McCrea vilified his eldest son for being an arrogant, obstinate, pushy, demanding chancer—ergo, for being just like his father. How much easier to manage, that docile, introverted boy who would never dare the f-word in front of his mother; a “late bloomer” with a queer fancy for architecture that my father found cute; a man (though I doubt my father ever thought of Truman as a man) too practical, or too cowardly, to move out of his parents’ house, and married to a wallflower who was inarticulate about politics and therefore failed to impress. Truman didn’t give my father competition.
My mother, too, eschewed competition, which is why in her books I came in third. With the wicked timing of the heedless teenager, I began to mature, or “grow curves,” as she would say, right around the time my mother started to sneak a second piece of pie. I always hated that expression, grow curves, which implied putting on weight. Instead I was whippet-thin in my teens, and my mother never forgave me.
It would be absurd for me to take her low rating personally; and I still kept an edge on the ACLU. Yet that among his burpy-poopy-screechy children I was my father’s favorite was also impersonal. My father adored me and my mother wished I would put a bag over my head from the same neutral ontology: I was the girl.
Perhaps the single surprise on my chart, then, was Mordecai, who would himself have been taken aback that he’d remained, after so many shouting matches, his mother’s pet. Maybe all women prefer their first-born sons. She always stuck up for him, though her advocacy often took the form of despair. I was glad for Mordecai that he’d retained a stalwart ally—he needed one.
Still, her partiality had its exasperating aspect. Had Mother’s devotion to number-one son been less fierce, she might have dismissed his foul language as puerile defiance best undermined by refusing to take issue. (My mother was one of the last late twentieth-century Americans for whom the f-word still had punch. It truly shocked her, like a physical slap, and left a brilliant red imprint on both cheeks. Since her heart attack, I had reached for an expletive and could not find a word sufficiently crude for my purposes. In the absence of offended audience, there is no obscenity; with my mother dead, it was impossible to be horrid.) But no—she had to dote on Mordecai, and so he could destroy her. She’d coronated the ingrate, which was like crowning the son most likely to chop off your head.
I turned the chart back over, and re-magneted the grocery list to the fridge, savoring that an entire family calculus rested underneath our continuing need for toilet paper.
Having delivered the aquavit, I stood in the parlor doorway, surveying the results of nearly forty years’ worth of primary school arithmetic.
“See, no measurement can be perfect,” Mordecai was expostulating. “But traditional science has always operated on the assumption that niggling influences, small mis-estimations, can be overlooked. Chaos theory trashed that. That one rounding off, the one pesky speck you failed to take into account, can overturn your results completely.”
“Like The Fly,” I said, but Truman wasn’t listening. Averil wasn’t listening. I felt like my mother, who kept up the naïve conviction to the last that all you need do for a “special time” is put enough blood relations in the same room. And for God’s sake, it wasn’t as if we had nothing to talk about. Far from wanting for subject matter, we were sitting in it.
“Man,” said Mordecai, as he propped his thick black lace-up boots on my mother’s fragile coffee table; its fluted edge began to creak. “How do you like that pompous horseshit about the ACLU? That was all Father cared about, causes. Never mind his kids.” On an open Britannica, he arranged a pack of Bambus and tin of Three Castles; shreds of tobacco dribbled across thin pages of cramped paint. “They felt guilty for living. Mother never splurged on a box of chocolates that she didn’t feel bad about.”
“She felt bad,” I added, “because they made her fat.”
“Hell, by the time you guys came along, they’d got downright profligate,” Mordecai went on. “Dirt, that was all I had to play with.”
“Dirt,” said Truman, not looking up from his equations, “and us.”
Mordecai liked to portray his childhood as threadbare, but often omitted that my father hadn’t been picking through Belmont’s garbage, but going to Harvard Law School. Boasting about your underprivileged background must be one more mark of the middle class. I had a feeling Real Poor People didn’t brag about it.
“I’m just floored,” said Mordecai, “that they didn’t salt away more than 300,000 lousy smackers. They saved enough dough on me. Moving out in ninth grade? No college tuition? And then I borrow 14,000 crummy dollars and it gets subtracted. All that we-love-you-we-want-to-help-you and they kept track.”
I knew that when people were hurting they often seemed recriminating and spiteful from the outside, as Andrew had let me know how much he cared for me by smashing years’ worth of my best work. Truman, however, would go to no efforts to rationalize his brother’s insensitivity, since to whatever degree he enjoyed Mordecai’s company at all it was when his brother hanged himself. There was a grim look of satisfaction on Truman’s averted face, as if he were already relishing the conversation with me later when he could once again cast his eldest sibling as a grabby, selfish boor.
“Don’t worry, Mordecai will make out okay,” Truman muttered, circling a figure in his lap. “He’ll walk away with $156,000, if Hugh’s numbers are right.”
“That’s if we sell the house,” said Mordecai, who seemed to have already arrived at this figure in his head.
“Or,” said Truman slowly, “if Corlis and