Growing Up (15 page)

Uncle Charlie, they all said, was “brilliant.”

“Almost a genius,” Uncle Allen told me. “With a mind like that he could have done almost anything.”

Why hadn’t he?

“Laziness,” Aunt Pat told me. She said it as though laziness were a disease, a bad heart or failed kidneys, for which he was not to be blamed. “Uncle Charlie is lazy, dear,” she said.

My mother spoke of the affliction in sorrow. “Poor Charlie,” she sighed one day when I asked why she and Uncle Allen and I had to work while Uncle Charlie never did. “He’s the laziest man God ever put breath into.”

It puzzled me that she considered my own laziness curable with a few whacks of the belt but tolerated Uncle Charlie’s with sorrow and love. Old enough now to study adults and their world with a skeptical eye, I began to suspect there was some secret about Uncle Charlie which they were hiding from me.

One evening when Uncle Charlie was in his bedroom reading and I was in the kitchen with Uncle Allen, Aunt Pat, and my mother, I probed for fuller explanations. “Didn’t Uncle Charlie ever work?”

Uncle Allen was in one of this twinkling moods. “Waaaal, I’ll tell you, Russ,” he said. “He worked until the Moe Simon business began to get him down.”

“He was a newspaperman,” Aunt Pat said. “When we all lived in Brooklyn. He worked for the—what’s the name of that paper, Allen?”

“The
Brooklyn Eagle
. Yeah, he was working for the
Brooklyn Eagle
.”

“Who’s Moe Simon?”

Uncle Allen poured himself another cup of coffee and leaned back in his chair. “You mean to say nobody ever told you about Moe Simon?”

“Oh, it was a terrible thing for Charlie,” Aunt Pat said.

Between them they told the story.

The problem began the first day Uncle Charlie reported for work at the
Eagle
. His editor looked at him curiously and called over one of the reporters. “Does this fellow look familiar to you?” the editor asked.

“Yeah, he looks just like Moe Simon,” the reporter said.

“That’s what I thought,” said the editor. Then to Uncle Charlie, with suspicion: “Are you related to Moe Simon?”

Uncle Charlie said no, he had never heard of Moe Simon.

A few days later Uncle Charlie was eating his soup in a
Brooklyn lunchroom when an evil-looking fellow slid into the chair across the table, looked around as if to be sure no police were eavesdropping, and whispered, “I got the stuff, Moe.”

In his Virginia drawl Uncle Charlie explained that he was not named Moe.

Persuaded by the southern accent, the man muttered, “Jesus Christ! You look enough like Moe Simon to be his twin brother,” and departed swiftly.

The Moe Simon resemblance began to prey on Uncle Charlie. Walking to work one day he was hailed by a stranger on the far side of the street. “Look who’s back!” the man cried to two other men with whom he was idling on the street corner, and all three of them waved jovially for Uncle Charlie to come over and join them.

Uncle Charlie did so.

“You been doing time lately, Moe?” one of the men asked.

“My name is not Moe,” Uncle Charlie said.

The men apologized: “Sorry, pal, but you’re a dead ringer for Moe Simon.”

Coming out of a Brooklyn subway not long afterwards, Uncle Charlie was stopped by a passing pedestrian.

“Hey,” said the man, “you look just like Moe Simon.”

Uncle Charlie dove back into the subway and rode to shelter at Uncle Allen’s place, where he reshaped his life so he would never have to go into public again.

Such was the story Uncle Allen, Aunt Pat, and my mother told me that night. They were all fanciful yarn spinners, of course, especially late in the evening when the coffee was being reheated, and not above weaving a comic fiction out of a single thread of fact, but I accepted the story as Gospel and secretly envied the way Uncle Charlie had rebuilt his life.

Uncle Charlie had four pastimes. He slept, read, smoked, and drank coffee. He was the only person I’d ever seen who, if asked his occupation, could have honestly answered, “Sleeping.” Eleven or twelve hours under the blankets presented no challenge at all to Uncle Charlie. It merely whetted his appetite for more, and
after a few hours off the mattress he often slipped back for a restorative nap. He usually slept until about one o’clock in the afternoon, then rose, made a pot of coffee, rolled a cigarette from his bag of Bull Durham, and settled down to read. His reading consisted mostly of biography and works on history, government, and politics. Aunt Pat, who went to the public library two or three times a week for the murder mysteries she consumed like fodder, kept him supplied with books. His one passion was politics, and to feed it he consumed the daily newspapers Uncle Allen brought home, listened intently to the radio newscasts, and studied the
Saturday Evening Post
and the
Literary Digest
.

Alone in that house full of New Deal Democrats, Uncle Charlie was a totally committed Republican. He regarded the 1932 defeat of Herbert Hoover as a disaster for the Republic and looked forward happily to the 1936 elections, when, the
Literary Digest’s
famous poll assured him, Roosevelt would be easily beaten.

Uncle Charlie gave me my first real education in politics. From Uncle Charlie I first heard the word “socialism,” a doctrine so evil, he gave me to understand, that it could destroy our country. America, he told me, had been built with initiative and hard work. Socialism, he told me, discouraged hard work and destroyed initiative. And socialism was what Franklin Roosevelt was practicing. Didn’t I ever look at the newspapers, for God’s sake? Didn’t I realize that millions of people were being given money by the government for doing no work at all?

Devoted to Roosevelt, I made the usual New Deal arguments children picked up on the streets.

“You’ll live to curse the day Franklin Roosevelt was born,” he told me.

Afterwards I shouldered my magazines and trudged off to work, and Uncle Charlie poured himself another cup of coffee, rolled a new cigarette, and stretched out on the sofa to reread
The Federalist Papers
. For the longest time I thought of Republicans as people who rose from twelve-hour stretches in bed to denounce idlers and then lie down with a good book.

Uncle Charlie, of course, only wanted to improve my
education. It pained him to see me wasting good reading time on Zane Grey’s westerns and the Oz tales. His own favorite book was
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
. It was one of three books that made up the parlor library, the other two being a Funk & Wagnall’s dictionary and the Bible, and Uncle Charlie reread the
Autobiography
frequently.

Catching me one day in the parlor reading
The Land of Oz
, he spoke to me angrily, which was very rare. “For God’s sake, Russell, you’ve got a good mind and you’re destroying it reading that trash. Here”—and he thrust Franklin’s
Autobiography
at me—“read something worthwhile.” I read until he left the room, then put it aside in boredom.

The hostility Uncle Hal nursed toward Uncle Charlie had nothing to do with politics but a good deal to do with
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
. It’s doubtful Uncle Hal had ever read a book from cover to cover. He was a man of large entrepreneurial vision. People who pursued the intellectual life as single-mindedly as Uncle Charlie outraged his belief that it was a man’s duty to make something of himself by scoring big in business.

Talking was Uncle Hal’s chief entertainment, and talking to Uncle Charlie was out of the question. When Uncle Hal wanted to talk, Uncle Charlie was in bed. Or worse, Uncle Charlie had his nose buried in a book. Idled for weeks, alone for endless hours with nothing to do but roam the sidewalks and prowl the house, Uncle Hal needed Uncle Charlie to listen to him talk, and Uncle Charlie was deaf to his need. If he listened at all, it was with impatience or maybe a curt sneer—“Quit talking baloney, Colonel”—for Uncle Charlie was contemptuous of Uncle Hal’s great plans.

In the kitchen one afternoon I heard Aunt Pat complaining to Uncle Charlie about so many cracks in her dishes. “Maybe the Colonel will buy a new set when his deal goes through,” she said.

Uncle Charlie snorted. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “That guy’s been a faker all his life.”

I began noticing that Uncle Charlie’s eyes became hooded and that he rubbed his chin with his fingertips when Uncle Hal
launched on his suppertime stories. I’d learned to recognize the hooded eyes and the chin rubbing as signs that Uncle Charlie thought I was talking nonsense when I discussed Roosevelt with him. Now I saw that he thought the same thing about Uncle Hal’s stories. I began listening to Uncle Hal’s stories in a different way, the way Uncle Charlie must have been listening to them. Watching Uncle Charlie measure his big brother, I was myself learning to measure older men with a more complex gauge than I had used before.

I began to perceive that Uncle Hal’s stories always portrayed him as the soul of manly chivalry. One evening at supper he told a story illustrating his refusal to tolerate the insolence of the lower classes. Its villain was a tough lout in Richmond who had spat insultingly in the dust at Uncle Hal’s feet. The man was a brute, not worth a gentleman’s thrashing with fists, though Uncle Hal said he could have given him a thrashing easily enough.

“I’ve taken boxing lessons, you know. From a retired prizefighter, and he showed me how to kill a man with my fists.” This was not a case for extreme punishment, though. “I didn’t do a thing but take off my belt—” Rising from the table, Uncle Hal yanked his belt off to illustrate.

“—and doubled it up in my hand like this—” He showed how to turn the belt into a weapon.

“—and then I laid that belt across the side of his head like that—”

A mighty whack against the kitchen wall.

“—and he took off running. Not a word out of him, by God. He knew, by God, I’d kill him if he so much as turned around and looked at me.”

I had been changed by Uncle Charlie’s influence. Under its power, I was losing childhood’s innocent credulity and beginning to realize that adults had weaknesses too. That night I knew there wasn’t a grain of truth in Uncle Hal’s story.

Uncle Hal, who was nobody’s fool after all, must have seen all
along that Uncle Charlie knew he’d been “a faker all his life.” It must have been hard to forgive Uncle Charlie for knowing that and for showing that he knew it.

Coming in from school one afternoon I walked into the parlor and saw Uncle Hal towering over Uncle Charlie in a rage. “Get on your feet if you call yourself a man, because I’m going to beat the Goddamn living hell out of you.” It was an astonishing scene in our house. Everything associated with Uncle Allen’s house was opposed to violence and abusive language.

Uncle Charlie, seated in an armchair, had been rereading
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
, which now lay on the floor where it had landed when Uncle Hal knocked it out of his hands just before I came in. I had heard the thud. It was hard to tell what had provoked him. He was in the prizefighter’s crouch now, fists ready and moving.

“Get up out of that chair, you little weakling. I’m going to give you the beating of your life.”

Uncle Charlie did not rise. He had seen me enter the room quietly behind Uncle Hal, and he spoke calmly.

“What do you want, Russell?”

Startled, Uncle Hal turned, saw me, dropped his fists, and departed quietly, obviously embarrassed because I had caught him behaving childishly. I judged that my entrance saved Uncle Charlie, for he weighed scarcely half as much as Uncle Hal and had been training too long on Bull Durham and coffee to have much of a chance against the Colonel.

Never mind. Uncle Hal had a plan to get rid of Uncle Charlie once and for all. He would ship Uncle Charlie so far that he would never be able to come back. San Francisco was the place he had in mind. In San Francisco there was yet another brother. This was my Uncle Willie. I had never met Uncle Willie. He was two years older than my mother, and as children she and Uncle Willie had been especially fond of each other. “Of all the boys at home,” my mother told me, “Willie was always my favorite. Willie was fun.”

Uncle Willie had “disappeared” in 1924 and stayed lost to the
family until 1935. After a brief, tumultuous marriage in the early 1920s, he had walked out on his wife one day in Washington and told nobody his whereabouts. Eleven years later my mother finally traced him to San Francisco, where he was living alone and working for a California state tax agency. He proved to be as fond of my mother as she was of him, and when he learned how things were with her and Uncle Allen he began sending her a regular monthly share of his salary.

Upon learning that Willie was prosperous enough to share his income, Uncle Hal decided that Uncle Willie should do even more. He wrote him a letter detailing the burdens Uncle Charlie’s joblessness placed upon Uncle Allen. In his role as senior brother and administrative director of the family, Uncle Hal suggested it was Uncle Willie’s duty to relieve Allen of that burden. In short, since Willie was living alone it would be easy for him to house his baby brother and help him find work. He, Hal, would put Uncle Charlie on the westward Greyhound as soon as Uncle Willie gave the go-ahead.

Uncle Hal let too much of his bile toward Uncle Charlie seep into the letter and disclosed too much about what he considered Uncle Charlie’s antisocial character. “If Charlie is entirely dependent on Allen,” Uncle Willie wrote back, “he is certainly not in a position to give rein to a temperamental or neurotic disposition. … If he is sound how can he be content to do nothing and see his widowed sister getting by on her own efforts? If I had anything I would be much more inclined to give it to Allen for all he has done for Lucy and Russell and Doris during the past five years. I believe that any normal person should rely on his own resources after reaching maturity.”

Uncle Hal wrote again. Uncle Willie’s reply this time courteously avoided asking why Uncle Hal didn’t himself remove the intolerable Charlie burden from Uncle Allen. “Coming to California would merely make matters worse, I believe,” he said. “The help I am giving Lucy takes all of my spare money. … I think Charlie would be much better situated in a small town than in a
large city such as this. Lucy seems to be getting by on her own power, and if I remember correctly Charlie is thirty years old. It’s time he was doing something for himself.”