Growing Up (14 page)

Very little of it went for idle pleasures, though. Part of it she paid to Uncle Allen as her contribution to the common welfare. Part was earmarked for the bank to finance the next big phase of her long-term program. This was to establish “a home of our own” where she and Doris and I would at last live in independence from Uncle Allen’s charity.

“A home of our own”—that was her great goal. She talked about it constantly. If Aunt Pat and I crossed swords—and sometimes we did, for with my mother away at work all day Aunt Pat had the mother’s task of enforcing discipline—my mother said, “Just be patient, Buddy, and one day we’ll have a home of our own.”

Aunt Pat was also beginning to yearn for a home of her own. We had come into her house in the dawn of the Depression for what my mother thought would be a few months with Pat and Allen until she could rent her own place. Now, at the pit of the
Depression, the few months had become three years, and the way the world was going it looked as if it might become fifty before Aunt Pat and Uncle Allen regained their privacy.

That winter, with the birth of their second daughter, their household expanded again. With his $30 a week and the few dollars my mother contributed from her salary, Uncle Allen was now supporting a wife and two baby daughters, his older sister, and his niece and nephew. Uncle Charlie was also with us now, and Uncle Charlie was jobless and penniless. There was more to come. Just around the corner was not prosperity, but Uncle Hal.

U
NCLE
Hal arrived in the night with three boards. This was after Uncle Allen had moved us to New Street, just off Belleville Avenue. We had an entire two-story house there, Uncle Allen and Aunt Pat sleeping downstairs in the dining room, which they’d turned into a bedroom, and Doris, my mother, and me sprawled luxuriously over two bedrooms on the second floor. There was a pool table in the cellar, a good big professional-size pool table. Aunt Pat had bought it for $5 from a bankrupt pool parlor, along with the billiard balls and a handsome set of cue sticks. She and Uncle Allen and my mother and Uncle Charlie were in the cellar playing pool when Uncle Hal arrived.

Doris and I had gone to bed on the second floor, Doris in my mother’s bed, me on the daybed in the room that had the radio in it and my father’s old rocking chair from Morrisonville. We called that room our “private parlor” because of the radio and because the daybed converted into a couch after I got up in the morning, allowing the three of us to sit in there and read or listen to the radio.

I had just dropped off to sleep when the racket started out front.

“Damn it, boy, careful with that board! Careful!”

Looking out the window I saw a flatbed truck drawn up in front of the house and two black men in overalls lifting off a plank while a third man shouted at them. He issued orders in an awesome voice.

“Steady there, steady! Watch what you’re doing, damn it!”

The two black men put the plank on the grass and started unloading a second.

“Put it down easy! Easy! That’s right. That board’s worth a fortune.”

He was talking loud enough to be heard all the way to Belleville Avenue. I went out into the hall. Doris was up too in her nightgown. I was always timid about taking action in a crisis, but not Doris.

“What do you think we ought to do?” I asked.

“I’m going to tell Aunt Pat,” she announced, heading for the cellar.

In the cellar they hadn’t heard the ruckus. There was clatter on the porch now. The doorbell rang. Up out of the cellar came Aunt Pat, trailed closely by Doris. Ready to give somebody a piece of her mind, Aunt Pat strode to the front door and flung it open. She was staring at a tall, stooped, sandy-haired man with a bushy mustache and no teeth. (“No teeth at all, just his lip flapping in the breeze,” she said afterwards.)

Before she could ask, he stepped forward with outstretched hand and told her: “Hi, Pat, I’m Hal.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she cried to the others, who had filed out of the cellar behind her and stood clustered in the hallway. “Let’s make a pot of coffee!”

Making a pot of coffee was the automatic reaction to every event at New Street, and after effusive greetings and cries of “Good Lord, it’s Hal!” and handshakes and embraces and kisses, somebody went off to fire up the pot.

Spotting me at the top of the stairs my mother said, “Come down here Russell and meet your Uncle Hal.”

I did and he shook my hand authoritatively.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Russell,” I murmured.

“Speak out, boy. Don’t be afraid to speak out.”

“Russell,” I repeated a little more firmly, but I had already lost his attention. He was talking big money to Uncle Allen.

“I’ve got three walnut boards outside that are worth a fortune,” he said. Turning to the black men who stood silently at the door, he shouted, “Don’t just stand there! Bring those boards in here and put ’em on the floor!”

The black men went into action.

“Leave any scratches on them and I’ll sue you for every cent you’re worth,” he growled.

Doris and I were sent back to bed then, but I knew I had seen an important man. With Uncle Hal’s commanding manner toward hired help and his impressive mustache and his fortune in lumber lying in the downstairs hallway, it was like having Daddy War-bucks come for a visit. I failed to notice that Uncle Hal had brought only one small suitcase, and I did not know he was toothless because he didn’t have enough money to buy a set of false teeth.

To my mother and Uncle Allen, Hal was the big brother, the oldest of Papa’s nine children, rightful heir to Papa’s mantle of authority, the one whose duty in life was to restore the family to the glory it had known before Papa’s death.

In the old days before the First World War, Papa had traded in the walnut veneer business. Since Hal had no interest in going to college, Papa had taught him the walnut veneer trade, and this had been his calling ever since. His home for the past ten years had been Richmond. Arriving at New Street unannounced in the night, he created the impression of mystery and grandeur which movies had taught me to expect in men of great affairs.

When they all gathered in the kitchen over coffee that first
night, he explained that he was up from Virginia to swing a large deal in New York. Had important business appointments scheduled over there. Thought he might as well take the opportunity to visit his sister and little brothers.

Wouldn’t he stay a while? Aunt Pat asked.

Well … Why not? Some things were more important than business. Things like family. He didn’t get a chance to be with the family that often. Why not stay a couple of days and talk over old times? No, of course he didn’t mind sleeping on the couch in the parlor. Didn’t mind at all. Not at all.

Next evening when Uncle Allen came home from his sales route and my mother from her sewing machine and me from my
Saturday Evening Post
route, I sat at the kitchen table long after supper listening to Uncle Hal talk about corporate giants with whom he was dealing in New York, and about the skill he would need to keep them from outwitting him in the big walnut-veneer deal. The boards in our hallway were cut from a forest full of walnut of the finest, rarest quality. Its location was known only to him. He would need great cleverness to keep New York businessmen from wheedling its location out of him, but he wasn’t worried.
He
knew how to handle such men.

I noticed that they referred to Uncle Hal as “the Colonel” and sometimes called him “Colonel” instead of Hal. I also noticed that while my mother and Aunt Pat seemed excited by the Colonel’s talk, Uncle Allen ate his macaroni and cheese as calmly as ever and didn’t seem much moved by the festive spirit infecting the rest of us.

He smiled agreeably now and then during the Colonel’s talk about the big walnut-board deal, but seemed genuinely interested only when asking about Virginia relatives he hadn’t seen for many years. Now and then Uncle Allen tried to extract certain dull business information about the lumber deal, but Uncle Hal, ten years his senior, brushed aside these questions with a wave of the hand. I could see that business on Uncle Hal’s scale of operations was far beyond Uncle Allen’s understanding.

Uncle Hal obviously knew it too. The only time he gave
Uncle Allen much attention that night was when he noticed Uncle Allen drinking coffee. In stern parental terms he told Uncle Allen he would ruin his health by drinking coffee.

Uncle Hal was an authority on many things, including stomach ulcers. He had undergone surgery for ulcers and predicted Uncle Allen would too, unless he gave up coffee and drank a quart of milk a day.

During the following days I noticed that Uncle Hal seemed to enjoy spoiling Uncle Allen’s meals by telling him he was “digging your grave with your own teeth.” One night at dinner Aunt Pat served candied sweet potatoes, one of Uncle Allen’s favorite dishes, and when Uncle Allen was well into his helping, Uncle Hal said, “Eating candied sweet potatoes is digging your grave with your own teeth, Allen.”

Uncle Allen smiled his agreeable smile and ate the rest of them anyhow while the Colonel explained at length that there was no food more likely to cause stomach ulcer than candied sweet potatoes. Unless it was fried chicken. Fried chicken was Uncle Allen’s favorite Sunday dinner.

“Eating that fried chicken,” Uncle Hal told him in the middle of one Sunday dinner, “is like digging your grave with your own teeth.”

From his first supper at New Street Uncle Hal insisted on the life-prolonging benefits of a good after-supper belch. After gumming his food he asked Aunt Pat to bring the bicarbonate of soda, spooned some into a glass of water, and delighted himself a few moments later with a magnificent eruption. “There’s nothing better for you than letting those poison gases out,” he said.

Uncle Hal’s business coup took longer than anticipated. His “couple of days” visit became a week’s visit, then developed into a month’s stayover. One month stretched into two. In the daytime he usually left the house explaining he had “appointments.” Maybe he did. We had no telephone; maybe he arranged his appointments on the pay phone at Zuccarelli’s drugstore.

Gradually his visit turned into a residency. His boards lay in the hallway for weeks, then months, and became a permanent part
of the furniture. He left the house less and less frequently and spent more and more time in the cellar playing pool.

When he first arrived my mother thought he might be an agent of salvation. She confided to me that Uncle Hal had promised to help us set up “a home of our own” after his lumber deal went through. “When Uncle Hal gets his business going he’s going to take us to Baltimore and help us have a nice place,” she told me a few nights after his arrival. As the months passed and the boards gathered dust in the hallway, she no longer talked about the wonderful day when Uncle Hal’s deal would go through but began speaking of a time “when Uncle Hal’s ship comes in.” And then,
“if
Uncle Hal’s ship comes in.”

Everybody was waiting for his ship to come in. It was a sad, bitter phrase used even by children to express the hopelessness of hoping. In the schoolyard we said, “When my ship comes in, I’m going over to New York and see the Yankees play.” Meaning that we never expected to be rich enough to sit in the Yankee Stadium. Now as the months passed, if I was out with my mother and an acquaintance asked about Uncle Hal, she replied, “Oh, he’s still waiting for his ship to come in.”

After Uncle Hal had stayed long enough to feel at home, he began to take his big-brother duties seriously and to apply his mind to reorganizing the family’s life. He saw that Aunt Pat was increasingly unhappy running a commune for Uncle Allen’s impoverished relatives and began devising plans for moving them out. The immediate task he set himself was getting rid of Uncle Charlie.

There was bad blood between Uncle Hal and Uncle Charlie. Hostility between them went back to childhood and had many roots, some of them possibly sinister, others quite natural. For one thing, Charlie was the baby of the family and had always been indulged and coddled. For another, Uncle Charlie was the embodiment of everything Uncle Hal disliked.

“That weakling,” he called Uncle Charlie one day while I was eavesdropping on him and Aunt Pat. I was shocked and offended by that. I was fond of Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie was the only person in the house who talked to me as one adult to another.

Admittedly, Uncle Charlie did look weak. He was even shorter than Uncle Allen and skinny to boot. He came to visit us in Morrisonville once when I was a toddler, and afterwards my grandmother marveled, “Hasn’t got an ounce of meat anywhere on him, wouldn’t make a meal for a hummingbird.” His eyes were palest blue, his hair bright yellow, his skin so white and transparent you could see the blue veins pulsing underneath. He had a long sharp nose, a pointed chin, and thin lips that curled up at the corners to make his happiest smile look like an elegant sneer.

Since for years Uncle Charlie had refused to leave the house for any purpose whatever, his wardrobe consisted of Uncle Allen’s hand-me-downs and things Aunt Pat picked up for him at the dry-goods store. They were always a couple of sizes too big. Swathed in billows of excess shirt and trouser material, all cinched tightly around his tiny waist with a belt, he looked like a child wearing a man’s clothes.

Uncle Allen had supported him almost constantly since 1923, though he did not take him in permanently until after my mother, Doris, and I came to Newark. Uncle Charlie had not worked since, nor looked for work, and it was taken for granted by everybody that he would never work again nor look for work. When Uncle Hal began planning to deport him, he was thirty years old and had already enjoyed several years of happy retirement.

My mother loved him dearly, but nevertheless held him up to me as a tragic example of the sluggard’s life. If she caught me idling when I should have been peddling magazines, it was: “Do you want to grow up to be like Uncle Charlie?” Preparing to give me “a good thrashing,” she cried, “You’re not going to be another Uncle Charlie as long as I’ve got anything to say about it.”