Truman’s affairs addressed, we moved to mine. “How about your sculpture, Core?”
Now, Mordecai himself was one of those entrepreneurs whose big break was always around the corner. I couldn’t count the times that he had arrived at Heck-Andrews, to stretch back and toss six digits around in the poignantly misguided assumption that money would impress my father. Yet the big round figures floated in on a puff of his chest, and floated out with a shrug of his shoulders; the New York recording studio contract would simply never come up again, and no one would ask. Only because the next time my brother would be back for a “loan” to see him through a “cash-flow crisis” would we understand tacitly that one more big break had not come through. In this regard I was truly sorry for my brother: that he was unable to share with his family a single grievous disappointment, of which he must have suffered so many.
However, those who don’t share their tragedies don’t invite yours. “I got a gallery interested,” I said, and didn’t attempt even an abbreviated version of my disaster.
The rest of our meal was consumed with yet another contract that Mordecai was sure he’d win for Decibelle, Inc. whose syllables he caressed with more sensuousness than he ever used naming his wife. I could only find it ironic that Mordecai was a self-taught audio engineer when the last thing he ever did was listen. We were treated to all the costly components he planned to install in a local nightclub; his rhythmic recitation of brand names and model numbers—the Stanley-Powers-Ebberstein-and-Whosits m2xy 50001-bh—gave his monologue a liturgical lilt, and my head began to list from Sunday morning narcolepsy. I felt an irrational urge to play Hangman on a church bulletin. As with any sermon, you didn’t interrupt, you didn’t participate, and you didn’t take any of it on board bar the fact that it was over.
Averil began to clear up, and stared down woefully at the pot where two gallons of Mordecai’s “secret sauce” remained.
“Freeze it,” I advised, and Truman laughed. Mordecai didn’t get it.
“Man …” He extended while the table cleared itself, and lit another roll-up. “This may sound uncool, but Mother dropping out of the game is something of a relief.”
“A relief?” The tendons in Truman’s forearms rippled as he carried off a tower of plates.
“Yeah.” When Mordecai tipped the chair back on two legs and slapped his stomach for emphasis, I puzzled how he’d managed to pick up so many of his father’s mannerisms, having left home in ninth grade. “She wasn’t ever happy after Father died, right?”
“Sometimes,” Truman objected tightly, scraping his wife’s spaghetti into the rubbish. “Besides, if she didn’t have anyone else to live for, whose fault was that?”
“Hers,” insisted Mordecai. “They lived in a smug self-congratulatory unit of two. Don’t kid yourself that we ever meant much to them—or that we could have made the slightest difference when Father was gone.”
Truman ran water in the sink, and kept his back to his brother. “You didn’t make much difference, that’s for sure.”
“Didn’t you ever imagine what it might be like if she lived to a hundred? Getting heavier and weak in the head, talking about Father all the time? Wetting her bed, no longer able to drive? Hell, yes, I’m relieved. She’s better off, and so are we.”
“The important thing, of course,” said Truman, “is how we are.”
As Truman plopped glasses into the soapy water, Mordecai wrapped his hand around his tumbler, and Averil, I noted, did not have the nerve to clear Mordecai’s glass.
“I find it a little hard to picture,” Truman went on, his voice almost affable in a way that unnerved me. “You driving to buy her groceries; you listening to the day they met in the Young Democrats for the eighty millionth time; you rolling up her smelly sheets and tucking in fresh ones. So what all are you relieved of?”
“You’re damn right I wouldn’t have changed her sheets. You would have, kid. I’m not that much of a sucker.”
Truman gripped the counter on either side of the sink, his head bowed. The veins in his hands were raised, shocks of hair on his crown standing on end like a cat’s in a corner.
“She dunked our stinky diapers and mopped up our vomit when we were sick. She cooked supper every night and if it wasn’t always gourmet we didn’t starve. It seems fair enough to expect something in return.” At last Truman turned his head. “If I’d have done it and you wouldn’t that doesn’t make me a sucker but you a cad. If it weren’t for Mother, you wouldn’t even be here.”
I had the feeling he was blaming her.
“Shit,” said Mordecai, rocking his chair on its back legs with his boot on the table. “I didn’t ask to be born, did I? She wanted to have kids, she had kids. Diapers went with the territory. I’ll tell you this, I didn’t want their favors. I wiped my own ass as soon as I was able, and at the age I could so much as turn a hamburger I walked. You’re the one who chose to stick around home until, what? Twenty-eight?” (Truman was thirty-one.) “You’d have cooked her strained peas, because she got you—you owed. I didn’t. So maybe I’m relieved for you, bro. There aren’t a lot of good sides to people kicking it, but she saved you a twenty-year nightmare and I’m just suggesting you admit it.” The front legs of his chair hit the floor.
Truman sudsed glasses furiously, though with his usual system, all the wine glasses at once, lining them on the left; he would rinse them in matching sets.
“What she saved you,” said Truman, “was money. If she’d lived longer, she’d have used up what you already seem to regard as inadequate compensation for putting up with her company an entire fourteen years of your life.”
“All right,” Mordecai proposed blithely. “You think I’m so money-grubbing? Let me pose you a hypothetical question. Say, Mother’s dead. A fairy appears, and offers you one more evening with your mother. A whole night. There’s one catch: you have to pay for it, out of your inheritance. Now, how much would that night be worth to you, bro? Would you pay $20,000? $15,000?”
“That’s a false dilemma,” Truman croaked. “It’s not fair, it’s not real. That’s like asking who do you love more, your mother or your father, when you can love both of them.”
“But you do love your mother or your father more, don’t you?” pressed Mordecai. “Besides, my little fairy isn’t absurd. You said yourself, the longer she lived the less we got, so every night did cost money, didn’t it? You haven’t answered me. How much would the hand-squeezing and hot cocoa be worth to you? $1,000? $500? Ten bucks?”
“I’d pay anything!” Truman cried.
“Are you so sure? I’ve looked at Garrison’s figures. You and my sister here want to buy me out of my birthright, ain’t that so? Bribe me with a bowl of soup?” (Even Mordecai had been forced to go to Sunday school.) “The way I see it, you two already don’t quite have the cash to send both me and the ACLU packing. So what if this one golden evening with Mommy—her arms around your neck, asking how your day went, patting your head and slipping you a big dish of ice cream—cost you just enough money that you had to sell the house? What if keeping your mother around a tiny bit longer meant you lost your beloved fucking house? Would you take the trade? Really?”
Truman took one of the unrinsed wine glasses and threw it on the floor. “Get out!” he shouted.
Yet it was obvious to all present that stressing a point by breaking crockery was derivative. Earlier in the evening, Mordecai had smashed an object of far greater value that made a much more splendid crash.
Mordecai stood and poured himself one more measure of aquavit; its caraway effluvium made me woozy.
“Something of an accomplishment growing up in this lofty loony bin,” he announced, “I live in a world of balance