A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver Page B

construction was Truman's first and may have remained his only cause. Though when the city council's plans were made public it became apparent that HeckAndrews herself was safe, other houses of her ilk were not. Besides, as Truman would readily fume, any major thoroughfare with its attendant Kwik Piks and Sinclair stations would destroy what antebellum ambience Oakwood had left. These were Truman's first halting diatribes, during which he'd turn fuchsia, thrash his hands, and sputter, 'They don't build these houses any more!' I was nasty. Whoosh! I'd whisper trucks in his ear. Bee-beep! He'd hit me, and he was big enough that the punches were beginning to bruise.
      I'd come home from Broughton to lure him to watch Dark Shadows with me, to be told he was slogging about the neighbourhood leafleting for a sit-in at the city council. He had a letter to the editor printed in the Raleigh Times; he wrote comment pieces for his junior high paper, The Mustang, and his social studies projects were obsessive; regardless of the era, he managed to write essays about Oakwood. My little brother was given to instant and enduring if sometimes irrational loyalties from which I had benefited myself.
      The battle over the beltway lasted eight years, and Truman's active opposition never flagged. At fourteen he became a founding member of the Society for the Preservation of Historic Oakwood; by fifteen he was volunteering after school for Preservation/NC, a non-profit concern dedicated to rescuing old properties state-wide to which he still donated ten hours of his week. The acme of his martyrdom was in 1976, on the Moser house lawn, where we now stood. At the time, the property was dilapidated and the city had condemned it, though according to Truman their intentions were less than honourable—the Moser house was smack in the path of Raleigh's prospective new road.
      The heavy digging equipment assembled, and so did a hodge podge crowd—hefty black working women, mothers with prams, boys with scooters, Truman, beginning to fill out now, strode from the mêlée and planted himself in front of the bulldozer. Once he encouraged the others to do likewise, the wrecking crew was at a loss, and shrugging, knocked off for the day.
      The SPHO got a stay from the courts, and over the winter Truman sawed and hammered through his Saturdays with the owner until they brought the Moser house up to standard. His grand stonewall before the bulldozer had made the front page of our morning paper; I bought five copies. He looked so brave and handsome, his chin thrust in precocious indignation. One of these was framed and yellowing in Truman's dovecot; another travelled with me in my wallet, flannelled from unfolding and smoothing and quietly refolding again.
      As for his second son's burgeoning political awareness, my father was underwhelmed. I might describe our father's attitude towards Truman's architectural fervour as rueful; Truman would say derisive. The civil disobedience and picketing campaign against the beltway may have galvanized blacks and whites together until Oakwood teemed with the 'community spirit' to which my father paid lip-service, but he'd little taste for potluck suppers in real life. He was a man with strict definitions of what qualified as worthwhile. He'd argue that people are more important than houses, don't you think? and Truman would return that people lived in houses. My father accurately divined, however, that it was not the tenants Truman cared about. In Father's defence, he was himself battling lawsuits filed by white parents against the city over bussing, and organizing discussion forums about integrated education that regularly degenerated into punch-ups. He had his hands full, and I can see how in comparison a fight over a freeway might seem small.
      Their differences came to a head twice. When Truman was a senior in high school, he suggested Heck-Andrews be listed on the National Register as an historic