the big deal?” I asked as we tripped down the stoop. “For Christ’s sake, I’m your sister.”
“You’re not married,” he said. “Filling out course registrations can be a big deal. If Averil can get jealous of a pencil, she can certainly manage it with a whole sister.”
I swished through the curling leaves of the black walnut tree.
He side-eyed me. “You’re looking pretty good.”
“Thanks. The last two weeks, I lost some weight.”
“Suits.”
I biffed him lightly on the upper arm, solid as a firm mattress. “You, too. Not bad.” It was a service we did one another, mutual confirmation that neither of us was falling apart.
As we cornered Blount Street to North, I glanced back at Heck-Andrews; gold light retouched the manila clapboard so it no longer seemed to need painting. Massive for a residence, it was dwarfed by the Bath Building rising behind it, a great white slab for the NC State Laboratory of Public Health. The steady roar of its circulation system Truman claimed to detest, but I’m sure he was used to the noise. It was the hulk of concrete itself he reviled. Erected in 1987, the Bath Building destroyed the view from our back porch, once of an open field used for landing the governor’s helicopter. The field was now circumscribed by a mall of polished granite office buildings, and children could no longer play Army there—a game my father had discouraged, and which had therefore been our favorite.
As we strode down Wilmington Street, my eyes swiveled from the Mall on our left to Oakwood on our right. It had taken me years of absence to notice that our neighborhood was bizarre. Smack in the middle of downtown Raleigh, our Reconstruction enclave might easily be mistaken for a state theme park; add a gruesome dental surgery, a pretty girl pretending to churn butter, and an over-priced beeswax candle factory and I think we’d have got away with charging tourists admission. The houses were all Colonial Revivals and Second Empires, with storm cellars, boarded-up outhouses, and a proliferation of chimneys; happy darkies hauling water from a hand pump would not have looked remotely out of place. The grand, leisurely scale of these dwellings had been made possible by the Civil War, which had ravaged and leveled so many homes around the capitol. Carpetbagging architects had poured down from the north, for land was cheap, pine plentiful, and labor, with freed slaves and veterans equally unemployed, eager to pound clapboard for a meal a day. The yards were grand, their hardwoods grown as lush and steady as their planters intended.
What Oakwood’s architects would not have anticipated was the New South on our left: a faceless array of stoic government granite indistinguishable from dozens of other downtowns north and south. This was the land of Internet and sun-dried tomatoes, no longer butt of barefoot bumpkin jokes, but the most rapidly expanding regional economy of the country, whose Research Triangle labs and industrial facilities drew scientists and magnates from all over the States. I cannot explain it, but none of this new-found sophistication stanched my horror when I 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.
