Assorted Prose (25 page)

H
E DIED
while shaving; when I was told of this, I pictured him staggering back heavily, stricken, his own amazed face in the mirror the last thing he ever saw. His face flashed there for him, hung there, slipped backward; and then the mirror was full of the blank bathroom wall. I pictured this so sharply I seemed to have been there.

At his funeral I felt, for the first time, my adult height. The Manatees are not a family of breeders, and the number of relatives was small; walking up the aisle to the front pew with my parents, my aunt and my two cousins, I felt tall and prominent. Walking back down the aisle after the service, I caught, from the faces of those still seated, an odd, motionless, intent look, almost an odor, of sympathy and curiosity and reverence for grief. The look, no doubt, was primarily directed at my aunt, the widow, who, on the arm of my father, led our ragged, rustling procession. But we all—all the relatives—shared in it and were for the moment heroes of bereavement: a surviving band, a clan. I carried my role proudly, though doubting that I had felt enough sorrow to earn it. I was just sixteen, still an inch or two short of my eventual height, but walking down that aisle I entered, through that strange odor of respect, pity, and wonder, the company of adulthood. I became a Manatee. Unfairly enough, my two cousins, my uncle’s daughters, were a little younger than I and emerged from the church, with all their bewildering weight of loss, still children, though fatherless.

Yet I had loved my uncle, as much as the distance between us permitted. He was famous and rich. Not so famous and rich, I have since discovered, as our branch of the family imagined, but enough for a head shot and a half column on the obituary page of
The New York Times
. Trained as an architect—though he never got his degree—he speculated in real estate, and there are several blocks of Manhattan that would not
look quite the same if he had never lived. The phantom presence of his importance hovered about our family table long before I first saw him seated there as a guest, and when I try to remember him as he was, his fame and wealth, which I so obtrusively wanted for myself, inflate and blur his face, making it unreally large and distant—a clown-faced moon hung in the skimpy branches of my family tree.

I cannot reach him. I can remember nothing about him that is quite real except his death; he is like a celestial body which only eclipse renders measurable. He was six feet, four inches tall, but his immensity was narrow-shouldered, small-boned and unmuscular. He was vain of having, for so outsized a man, rather small feet. He usually wore neat black loafers, virtually slippers, of English leather, and, sprawling soddenly in a chair, he generally contrived to thrust his feet forward on the floor, or up on a stool, so they were noticed. I remember my mother—I must have been ten or eleven—teasing him about his dainty feet. I cannot recapture her words, but she was still slim then, and her pose as she spoke—head tilted back, hands half lifted—stuck in my mind; she so seldom struck an unmotherly attitude that it was as if a strange spirit had come and for a moment possessed her body. My uncle, presumably, responded with a dry flutter of the sheepish gallantry that he seemed to reserve for my mother and for waitresses in restaurants. My mother seemed exempt from the rather lazy distaste with which my uncle viewed the rest of the world, and perhaps, as her son, I was included in the exemption, for he was kind to me.

He taught me gin rummy. The very name of the game excited me with visions of parlor cars and high hotel rooms full of heavy, expensive men—world-wielders—smoking cigars and playing for a dollar a point. We would play gin rummy for hours on the side porch of our homely little green-shingled house in our once-rural suburb of Providence. My uncle and his wife and daughters would visit us here once a year, always in the summer, and for exactly three days—never more. He would cite the adage about fish and guests stinking after three days, adding, “And we’re both.” The manatee is, of course, an aquatic mammal, with a flat snout and rounded tail—but my uncle was willing to twist the truth to cinch a joke.

“Leonard, how’s your friend Christ?” would be, with each visit, the first and virtually the only question that he would direct at my father. It was a joke, but my father would answer the question seriously; his
involvement with church and community affairs was so consuming that he was rarely at home in the evenings. He was older than my uncle by two years but had long ago ceased to be a challenge to him. As my father talked about church feuds and Lions’ Club politics, my uncle would sink silently deeper into his chair, a kind of fine powder of resignation would whiten his large face, and the thrust-out, exquisitely shod feet would conspicuously fidget.

Humiliated that my uncle, who manipulated city blocks like a giant, should be bored by the petty details of our timid lives, I scolded my father privately. He said, “No, he’s interested. He’s my brother. You’re an only child, Freddy, so that probably doesn’t make any sense to you.”

I was an only child, and there was little in my life beyond my uncle’s annual visits to broaden my definition of “family.”
He’s my brother:
this simple assertion plunged me backward into depths I could never understand. By the time I reached my mid-teens, my mind, like a soft surface lightly but repeatedly tapped, had received from these visits some confusing impressions. My father, dismissed by his brother, had turned in his heart toward Thelma, my uncle’s wife, a stoic, chain-smoking woman whose face seemed to have suffered so many jolts that certain corners of it would never relax again. She must have found much in her pious, modest brother-in-law that was soothing; she was an amateur gardener in much the same obsessed way that he was a deacon, and the two of them would go for long walks together, she looking at the vegetation, he performing altruistic errands. Sitting side by side on the couch looking at old family photographs,
they
seemed the siblings; there was even a physical resemblance. The skin of both had grown darker with age; their faces were wrinkled as if with the cracks of a tough varnish. Meanwhile my uncle, so fragilely pale and pink, hovering humorously on his pampered feet while my mother, more gracefully than usual, performed the motions of housework, showered upon her a kind of antic indulgence which I supposed was fraternal. These impressions, bafflingly contradicted at the end of each visit when my uncle and aunt got into their gray Cadillac with their girls and, waving, disappeared down the driveway together, suggested to me that in the depths of the mystery called “family” there lay, necessarily, an irrevocable mistake.

“Freddy, who ate the cards?” With this absurd question my uncle would invite me to play rummy. My father would be off at work. My aunt and my mother would be somewhere in the house tugging, with
the elaborate and pained tact that lay between them, the housekeeping duties back and forth. My cousins, who lived in a small chaste bivalve world in which they always faced each other, would be engaged underfoot in some conspiratorial girlish game. I would find the cards. My uncle would sit down and deal. We would play for hours on the porch, the side screens sieving the songs of insects, the sounds of traffic swelling from a whisper at noon to a waterfall roar by suppertime. Timidly I would ask if I weren’t wasting his time.

He would laugh and shuffle the cards once more. He had a loud, easy way of riffling them together that I could never quite master. “Most of my time, Freddy, is wasted time. I’ve sat in railroad stations all day long.”

“But isn’t there something important you should be doing?”

“Because I’m important? You don’t understand, Freddy—importance is entirely a matter of belief. The more important you are, the less important what you do is. When you reach my stage, nothing you do matters at all. The most important thing in my life right now is to whump you at this witless game. Your draw.”

He played to win, and I loved him for that. So many adults refuse to give a child the compliment of a contest. Now and then, as he deliberated over the upturned pile, and then plunged and took them all into his hand, I felt for an instant the decisive thrust that had carried him so far into the world of money.

I was still groping, trying to discover in him what it was like to be rich and famous. I searched his face; it was an ugly face, a clown’s and giant’s both. His cheekbones seemed broadened by the extreme closeness of his old-fashioned, centrally parted haircut. His small slanting eyes twitched alertly in their puffy mountings of sleeplessness. His nose, battered by college football, was rose pink, and his teeth were yellowed by tobacco.

“Someday
you’ll
be important,” he said suddenly.

Startled, I lied, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

“I think so. You’ll do it to please your mother.”

“Really? You think she cares?”

He didn’t answer, but instead lay down three triplets and went out. As he totted up the points caught in my hand, he said, “Don’t do everything to please your mother. It’s a mistake.”

It was the only advice my uncle ever gave me, and I am not sure I understand it still. I have, in an unimportant way, become important;
if I died tomorrow, I might receive three or four inches in the
Times—
about as much, say, as the mother superior of an upstate nunnery. I have taken a slower, more scholarly route than my uncle, and the other day, in reading a treatise on fools, I encountered a certain King Suibhne, of ancient Ireland, who abruptly became a fool in the tumult of battle: “Unsteadiness, restlessness, and unquiet filled him, likewise disgust with every place in which he used to be and desire for every place which he had not reached.” I recognized the sensations. They are ours, the Manatees’. I feel now how my father roved the streets, seeking good to do, because he was possessed by “disgust with every place in which he used to be and desire for every place which he had not reached.” And my uncle, too, though he sought to escape the curse by remaining in a chair, was an unquiet traveller; the family discontent vibrated in him until he collapsed. Because shuffling cards and striking matches were the most strenuous things I ever saw him do, when I heard of his first heart attack it seemed a mistake. How could a man overwork his heart when he was always sitting with his feet preeningly stretched out before him?

The summer after the winter of his first attack I was invited, alone, to visit his home in Rye, New York. They lived in a big white house on what seemed to my semirural eyes a rather small lawn. My aunt’s flower-and-vegetable garden took up most of the land. I was disappointed that the difference between their house and ours was one of degree rather than kind. A maid came in on Mondays and Fridays, and in the living room there was a panelled closet full of liquor bottles, with a faucet for water and a small pine counter like a bar; otherwise it was a house like ours, with rooms (only more) and rugs (only deeper) and chairs and windows and books. Their bookcases smelled like my parents’ college yearbooks and held dark brown Modern Library editions from the twenties, with jiggly type and stingy margins, and an English edition of
Ulysses
bearing a longbow on the spine. I opened
Ulysses
and was appalled, in the middle of a blank August afternoon, by the keen scent of death the packed words gave off; my uncle had long ago marked a few passages in the margins, and his pencillings were like the tracks of someone who had preceded me through Hell.

I was fifteen that summer and stayed two weeks, reading books and mowing the lawn and playing badminton with my cousins. Several times my aunt drove me into Manhattan. She became confiding; as an only child I was susceptible to adult confidences. She told me about my
uncle’s heart. It had been weakened by his work, his weight, his total lack of exercise, his drinking, his smoking, and—her eyes suddenly glittered with tears, making my stomach clench—his lack of will to live. “He doesn’t care enough, Freddy, if he lives or dies; he just doesn’t see that great a difference.” But my attention had snagged on the first thing she had said. His work? But many days he came home from New York on the shoppers’ train, and some days he did not go in at all, just loafed around the house in his bathrobe all morning and had lunch by himself at a restaurant in downtown Rye. Though he and Aunt Thelma never quarrelled in my presence, I soon learned to detect, from the atmosphere in the house, when he had returned with liquor on his breath. His doctors had ordered him to stop smoking and drinking.

In the evenings, often, my cousins and my aunt would go to bed while my uncle and I sat up playing gin rummy. As soon as his wife’s footsteps hit the stair, he would take a rumpled pack of Camels out of his pocket and begin to smoke. His big, crimped, clownish mouth did not so much smoke the cigarettes as swallow them; one after another they vanished in front of his face, and the light of the bridge lamp over his shoulder turned blue. When it was my turn to shuffle, he would go to the panelled closet; there would be a soft tinkling noise, and he would bring back a glass of ice cubes and amber liquid. I would drink ginger ale to keep him company; many nights I drank a whole quart. We often stayed up past one o’clock, and, though little was said that did not relate to the cards, I felt trusted. My parents kept regular hours, so the region of time beyond midnight still held a romance for me. As the sounds of traffic outside dwindled to an occasional speeder spurting from one horizon of silence to another, my uncle and I seemed to be travelling together like two card players on a perfectly greased train riding absolutely level tracks into a hushed beyond where his harrowed, puffy face was no longer ugly but utterly appropriate, like an angel’s in ether. His presence, in the beginning a mere inflated projection on the flat facts of his fame and wealth, was given a shadowy third dimension by what I knew now of his life. His attack had caused my parents to reminisce about him. He had been the precocious, favored baby of my grandmother’s house; he had had a double aptitude, for drawing and mathematics, and had resolved it into the ambition to be an architect. He had finished half his training, when his father, in a swift street accident, died, leaving nothing but debts. He had faced the choice of completing his training and beginning his years
of apprenticeship, or of quitting and immediately helping my father support their mother; with his slightly brusque decisiveness, he had chosen the latter. Henceforth he lived, as my father put it, “by his wits,” and apparently thrived. Their mother lived for twenty more years.