My Other Life (2 page)

"People who said 'preppie' are preppies," he snarled. "People who use the word 'yuppie' are yuppies."

He screamed at the word "hopefully," but he smiled at "wing nuts," or "pebble dash," or "fish fingers," or "griddle iron." He laughed out loud when he heard someone like an old carpenter look up at his house and say, "The cheeks of that dormer are out of whack," and once when I said "shitsy" he wrote it down.

I said, "Why did you do that, Uncle Hal?"

He said, "I didn't do anything. I didn't write anything. What are you talking about?"

Had I even mentioned writing? But there was the pen in his pocket, and the little notebook. He saw me looking. "That's my wallet," he said. "I use it as a wallet. Don't you know that it's rude to stare? A gentleman never stares."

But I could not help it, and that made him madder.

"Paulie, are you one of these people who has all the qualities of a dog except fidelity?"

"Sorry."

"A gentleman is always correct in his demeanor!"

He was wearing a stretched Red Sox T-shirt, a ski hat with a bobble on top, a pair of army pants with big deep pockets at thigh level, and string instead of laces in his shoes.

People thought he was half Indian—he had that look, dark and unpredictable, as though he would fly into a fit of sudden anger or else stalk away. He didn't look like anyone else in the family. Uncle Hal's appearance convinced me that a person's disposition gives him certain features and changes him physically for life. Hal was big and shaggy and fierce, and if he was invited for lunch, he probably would not come, but if he did, he would show up late in his ragged clothes, stinking of his stables, and his expression and the look in his eyes challenged you to make a comment.
I dare you to mention my clothes.

If you did, he would not say anything, though he would hesitate, as though pronouncing a curse on you, and wiggles of steam would start from his body. Next he would vanish and someone would say, "Where's Hal?" and someone else would say, "He was here just a minute ago."

Eventually you would get a letter—a horrible corrosive letter, one of his worst,
You have all the qualities of a maggot except vitality,
and no one would see him for months.

But when you saw him again he might be wearing Mickey Mouse ears and singing, "My name is Annette Funicello," or else doing the bunny hop across Route 28, down by the mini-golf, to make the traffic stop and to amuse the person he was with, probably a young woman, giggling with bewilderment.

He did not drink alcohol. He had stopped smoking through "sheer willpower" and then he gained forty-five pounds. He cried bitterly when his cat Daedalus died. He was always to be avoided when the Boston Celtics lost a game.

A lunch party he was invited to might result in much worse than his disappearance. What if there was someone present he instinctively disliked, such as one of the celebrities or millionaires he had sent a poison pen letter? What if it was someone to do with literature?

"Lecheracha—litracha—letterachore—I can't even say the word!"

He seemed to develop an instant hatred for anyone who wrote or published or sold books, and his hostility could be baffling. It often took the form of fooling questions, and the people didn't know whether they were being mocked. Maybe Uncle Hal was just being friendly, they thought. But I knew better.

"Spell 'minuscule,'" he would say to these book people, and most of them thought the word began m-i-n-i-. Or Uncle Hal would chant at them, "Harry Martinson! Odysseus Elytis! Rudolf Eucken! Karl Gjellerup! Verner von Heidenstam!" and sometimes more names; and when he had the attention of the whole room he would ask, "Who are they?"

None of the book people knew until Uncle Hal laughingly told them that these men had all won the Nobel Prize for "lechera-chore—excuse me!"

With the other party guests he took a different line. If they talked about art, he changed the subject and complained about the high price of cat litter, or claimed he had never missed a single episode of
Sesame Street,
or wasn't it time we espoused a keener interest in the future of the Kurds?

"I didn't hear your poem," he said, tottering like a bear with his cheeks blown out and facing the man who had just recited the poem, "because I had a mouthful of crackers and I like to hear them crunching loud in my ears as I chew."

They were Uneeda Biscuits, he said. Weed Wacker, Beard Buster, Froot Loops, Panty Shields, Odor Eaters, Sno-Pake, and Duck Tape were other names he liked saying.

The Duck Tape he used for mending his glasses, and there was so much it made them lopsided. He squirted oil on his shoes, and boasted about how cheap it was, until his shoes caught fire when someone accidentally threw a match. He bought two-gallon jars of mayonnaise that were labeled "For Restaurants and Institutions." One Christmas he gave my forty-three-year-old aunt a baby doll with a crack through its wooden head and told her it was very valuable.

That same year he gave me a pair of nutcrackers. They were rusty, but Uncle Hal said, "Made in Germany. The finest nutcrackers are made in Germany."

For three years Uncle Hal had worn nothing but black clothes and—someone said—a cape. I never saw the cape. He was expert at table tennis, pool, basketball, and chess. He claimed to know the obscure rules of various card games. He was unbeatable at checkers and tic-tac-toe. He said he had once eaten kangaroo meat, smoke-dried, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Australia. You would have to marvel at this, because if you doubted it, he would go silent and vanish again.

He could not swim, and once, out quahogging, he stepped in a mudhole and almost drowned. "Quicksand!" he said afterwards. He was afraid of spiders and loud noises—thunder in particular—and said he was disgusted by the sight of other people's feet. He hated high winds, and after a whole summer of wind he climbed on his roof and fired his shotgun into the gusts. Ice cream, he said, was his weakness. He would drive fifteen miles to a place that sold frozen pudding flavor. ("Howard Hughes was addicted to banana nut," he said, "which is another difference between us.") He had a fondness also for pumpkins, lobsters, and pistachios ("It means 'grinning' in Farsi, as you know"). He often snacked on dog biscuits.

He had a habit of leaving notes for you—stuck in the window or shoved under the door or squeezed beneath the windshield wiper. The messages said
I totally disagree with you,
or
Do not make any attempt to communicate with me,
or
I will be unavailable until November.
The simple message was hurtful enough, and then you realized that in order for him to get the message to you in this way, he had to sneak over to your house in the darkness, sometime between two o'clock and five o'clock that morning.

"I'm busy! I've got a million things to do!" he would shriek just before he left us. He had no wife, he had no children, he had no job, he lived alone, he never traveled. We could not imagine what he was busy doing.
Don't put Uncle Hal on the spot
was a family caution.

On one occasion Uncle Hal began to reminisce, to an Irishman, about Dublin, Ireland. He named specific streets and pubs where he had drunk pints of ale, and churches where he had prayed. He lamented that it was all gone, replaced by cheapness and fakery.

Afterwards it gave me a pang to recall the look on that Irishman's face as he listened. But some years later I discovered that Uncle Hal had never been to Ireland, nor had he been to Australia. He said he could speak Swahili, but since no one else in the family knew how, there was no way of verifying it. "Conversational Latin" was how he described another language he knew.

He liked telling the story of how he had had an appointment with a billionaire ("There are only thirty-six in the entire world, and I know five of them"). This was to have taken place at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, but Uncle Hal had been turned away by the doorman for not wearing a tie—he was wearing a war-surplus sailor suit and rubbers. The billionaire had to meet him at the Shamrock Luncheonette. The business was unspecified.

He had been bitten on the thigh by a rat, he said. "This was in the market in Antsirabe, in Madagascar. Oh, years ago."

He owned a pair of wooden skis, a wooden tennis racket, a leather hat, a manual typewriter of cast iron, clamp-on roller skates, and a bike with no gears. He claimed he used them all the time. I never saw him use any of them.

After he stopped visiting us, Uncle Hal was seen playing with the neighborhood children who regularly came to his house. He gave them candy, he showed them his Japanese sword, he taught them how to do the bunny hop, he played tag with them, he encouraged them to tell him about their fears and hopes. At Halloween, he put on a mask and led them around the neighborhood. He was Santa Claus at Christmas, he was the Easter bunny, and on the Fourth of July he set off fireworks in his orchard.

While these small children boldly went upstairs and demanded candy, we older kids hung back, too afraid to approach, afraid he would angrily send us home. We stood at the margins of his yard and saw him playing—running, screeching, his gray hair twisted, his shirttails flying. "You can't catch me!"

People saw him at the playground, the beach, the schoolyard, the swings.

I was at college then. One weekend, returning from Boston—this was the spring I graduated—I bumped into Uncle Hal at the post office. He was sending a large parcel and being very mysterious about it, concealing the address from me. I never knew what sort of welcome I would get from him and so I gave him the most tentative greeting. He surprised me by saying how glad he was to see me. "Want to see something? Huh? Something really amazing?"

He pushed the parcel across the counter and then he was breathless, he was flying. His shirt was inside out, he was wearing striped pants and high-top sneakers. He hurried me to his house and pulled out a drawer—one of his treasure drawers. He took out a toy rifle—an air rifle, but an old one.

"It's a BB gun—the original. I had that very model when I was ten years old. See the Red Ryder insignia on the stock? Listen, it's in perfect working order."

He aimed it and went
pah! pah! pah!
"I've been looking for one of these for years."

There was more in the drawer. A green plastic water pistol. A pack of bubble gum wrapped in colored waxed paper and containing two baseball cards. A
Sky King
ring with a secret compartment. A copy of
Tales from the Crypt
comic book. A hat—but no ordinary hat. He put it on.

"We used to call this a beanie," Uncle Hal said. There was a propeller on top. He spun the propeller with his finger and said in a small boy's quavering, stuttering voice, "I got an idea! Let's go down to Billy's house and play marbles. Hey, I got my bag of aggies. These are good shooters." He swung a little clinking bag out of the drawer. "This one's a real pisser. Hey, what's wrong, Paulie, don't you want to come?"

He took me by the arm. The propeller on his beanie was still turning. Was he defying me to make a remark?

I clutched the books I had brought home to study for the weekend, for a paper I had to write.

"Malinowski makes the point," Uncle Hal said—but how had he seen the small printed name on the spine of the book?—"that in the Trobriand Islands the relationship between a woman's brother and her son is stronger than between the boy and his father. In other words, the uncle and nephew—because there is definite proof of a blood relationship and there is always an element of doubt about the true paternity of a child. And similarly in
Beowulf
you see the same affinity, and a specific Anglo-Saxon word for the relationship—the uncle and nephew usually fighting together in battle."

As he spoke, the propeller on his beanie still spun.

"Paulie, don't you see that I am showing you how to fight," he said, "and how to live?"

The propeller slowed as he stared at me. I was too afraid to say anything.

"What are your plans?"

"I joined the Peace Corps. I'm going to Africa. Nyasaland."

"Capital, Zomba," Uncle Hal said. Jerking his head in a nod of self-congratulation, he got the propeller going again.

He went to a bookshelf and hunted for a moment, then found what he was looking for, a bulky biography entitled
Rimbaud.
He opened it and, with the propeller on his beanie still slowly turning, he read, '"I am obliged to chatter their gibberish, to eat their filthy messes, to endure a thousand and one annoyances that come from their idleness, their treachery, and their stupidity. But that is not the worst. The worst is the fear of becoming doltish oneself, isolated as one is, and cut off from any intellectual companionship.'"

Listening, but also watching the propeller on his beanie, I was too distracted to reply.

"Am I keeping you?" he asked in a voice as dry as paper.

He's a terrible enemy,
people used to say,
but he can be much worse as a friend.

We saw less and less of him. He stopped phoning. He didn't even call us when he needed to move a ladder or jump-start his car. Instead, we heard stories about him. His name would come up and someone in the room would say softly, in a wounded voice, "I once got a letter from Hal," and would turn pale and serious, remembering. You would not want to hear any more.

Or someone would tell how Uncle Hal had been very ill and had spent a month in the hospital. We would feel ashamed that we had not known. But then the stories would come out—how he insisted on wearing his bobble hat while being x-rayed; how he had accused a distinguished surgeon of stealing his old pocket watch; how he had run up an enormous phone bill by making repeated calls to London, England; how he had begged his nurse to marry him and then changed his mind when he discovered that she had been recently divorced. "Damaged goods" was all he said. After he was discharged from the hospital, the telephone in his room was found missing, and an armchair, and a huge bottle ("For Institutional Use") of aspirin.

Another story began circulating—that he had been seeing a psychiatrist for some time, that he had told this man about his childhood, and how his mother, my grandmother, had never picked him up when he had cried in his crib. And that was not all. There were childhood humiliations, episodes of loneliness and rejection and total isolation, and tales of his imaginary friend Robin, who was sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl, and his nightmares and his rituals about opening jars and crossing streets.