Little Boy Blues (7 page)

My uncle looked relaxed only when he was fully dressed in a suit and tie, suspenders and a vest. If you put him in a bathing suit on the beach, he looked like he’d forgotten to finish dressing. He was one of the last men I knew to give up hats. His manner was as stiff as his wardrobe. He was not a dour man—he affected a jolly manner and he told more awful jokes than
Reader’s Digest
—but there was nothing easygoing about him. He was impatient, pious, more than a little close-minded and quick to
take offense. He was also kind, generous, disarmingly naïve and transparently childlike. He took enormous pleasure in the simplest things—a blueberry muffin, a birthday card, a sturdy pair of wingtips. Small children and women, especially spinster women in his congregation, loved him, the men a little less. He didn’t care for sports and wasn’t much for small talk. If he found himself in a group of people where the conversation fell off, he filled the silence with one of his jokes, which just seemed to make everyone feel worse.

His father, Brother James Bryan, had been something of a local celebrity in Birmingham, Alabama, where he preached and ran a mission for the city’s down-and-out in the first half of the twentieth century (it was always easy for me to figure out how old my uncle was, because he was born in 1900). One of the handful of books in our apartment was a biography of Brother Bryan called
Religion in Shoes
. I think my uncle became a preacher because of his father, whom he revered, but he was otherwise singularly unqualified for the job. He wasn’t inspiring in the pulpit—I took my mother’s word for this—and he was tone deaf when it came to dealing with other people. He lacked, by any definition, the common touch, and as I grew older, I came to think of him as a man who was trying, not very successfully, to lead someone else’s life.

My uncle was not much of a father figure in any conventional sense. He was useless at games, knew nothing about cars or how to start a fire without matches or how to fish or fire a gun. To his credit, he never pretended otherwise. He never said so, but he let me know early in life that if I was going to hang around with him, we’d be doing what he did, not what I wanted to do. That was fine with me. I liked going on errands to the newspaper and the radio station or the dry cleaners, where you walked into a room that felt
like it was made out of heat, or the city market, where the smell of the fish market against the far wall slapped you in the face all the way across the room. I liked it when we went downtown together for haircuts, and I could sit on the board straddling the red leather armrests of the baroque barber chair and sneak a peek out the window onto Trade Street where the one-legged man was hawking
Blum’s Almanac
on the sidewalk. And I knew the precise location of every gumball machine in every one of these establishments. Some errands were more fun than others. If we stopped at the hospital, I had to cool my heels in the waiting room, because in the fifties, children weren’t allowed on the wards or even in private rooms. Most of my childhood, at least the parts where childhood overlapped with the adult world, was spent waiting for something to happen—waiting to go someplace in the car, waiting while they visited or shopped, waiting to go home—and the nadir of these powerless, impotent, kicking-the-seat-in-front-of-you moments was the hospital waiting room. My uncle never said anything about making it up to me after one of these visits, but more often than not on the way home he would invent an errand to please me. Sometimes it was the Orange Crush bottling factory, where I could stand as long as anyone would let me and watch the bottles coming down the assembly line, getting filled, then capped, then cased. And at the end there was always a bottle of orange soda for the ride home. Or, better yet, we would detour to the train yards at the north end of town. The age of the steam train, like the era of the tent-show circus, was nearly over by the time I was born, but one line, Norfolk & Western, kept the steam engines running a few years after everyone else had converted to diesel. We would roll up into the lot alongside the tracks, park and then sit for half an hour watching
the switch engines shuttling boxcars back and forth. The endless changes of direction caused the drive-wheels, big as houses to my eye, to spin and scream where they struggled to gain a purchase on the tracks, while white smoke poured from the smokestacks. My uncle got a flat almost every time he drove into that lot, but he never stopped taking me up there.

Tom and Melita weren’t big readers. They didn’t watch much television, even when they got one (although she did become a devoted fan of
I Love Lucy
late in life). They didn’t go to movies unless it was a Bible story or a movie with a Christian theme, such as
Ben-Hur
. During the day, my aunt kept the radio on for company while she cooked, but while everyone I knew had heard
Elvis Presley, I had only heard
of
Elvis (until one night while riding in someone else’s car—someone with a car radio; I remember sitting in the backseat when a syrupy voice filled the car with a lachrymose ballad—”That’s Elvis,” someone said, and I laughed, because I had thought he would sound scary). The station my aunt tuned in broadcast a mixture of crooners, lush instrumentals from the Percy Faith Orchestra and the occasional novelty tune, Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock” or one of Slim Gaillard’s nonsense numbers, such as “Cement Mixer, Putti, Putti.” Mostly, though, my aunt and uncle just worked. After supper, he would return to his study to handle paperwork, type letters, work on his sermon or record the next day’s dial-a-prayer, a phone service he was most proud of having introduced to Winston-Salem. This was about as space-age as things got in our family in the fifties, when no one ever went anywhere and no one ever had a new car or air-conditioning or any appliance more modern than a steam iron.

Uncle Tom and Aunt Melita drank tea, not coffee. She never learned to drive. They didn’t play cards or go dancing, and except at Sunday dinner and on vacation, they never went out to eat. She was the only woman I ever knew who still darned her husband’s socks. Even their vacations were eccentric. Every summer, for two weeks in August, they went to a place called Chautauqua in western New York State. I had never heard of people who went on vacation so that they could attend lectures on current events, go to Bible study and listen to the symphony at night. I went along with them three times and always had a good time, but when I returned home and had to explain what this place was to my friends or their parents, I realized how odd it sounded. It was as though Tom and Melita lived life under a bell
jar, cut off from other humans. The people in their church treated them that way. The preacher and his wife constituted their own social circle.

I never heard anyone speak unkindly of my aunt, except my mother, and she only ever complained of how saintly her sister was. Aunt Melita was a quiet, sweet-tempered woman who lived in her husband’s shadow—lived to make him happy however she could: by cooking what he liked to eat, by deferring to his opinions and tolerating his impatience and his habit of always seeming in a hurry. I thought of her—I believe everyone did—as having no life of her own, unless one can be said to have a life that is led in continual subservience to another. Part of this was occupational hazard: a preacher’s wife in that time and place was defined by what her husband did for a living, although neither my aunt nor my uncle would have called what he did a job. They would have said it was a calling, and she was part of that.

My aunt and uncle had no children of their own, after their one daughter died in infancy back in the twenties. Wherever I went with them, I was mistaken for their grandson. Aunt Melita was fifteen years older than my mother, and by the time I knew her, her hair was already turning gray. She never bothered to color it, much to my mother’s annoyance: “I don’t see why you don’t try a little rinse, Melita. You know, a man likes to have his wife look young.” I thought of my mother as the modern member of her family. She kept up with current fashion trends, drove her own car, bought her vegetables in the frozen section of the supermarket and got her hair done every week. More than that, she moved at what I considered a modern pace. She was always in a rush. Aunt Melita, in contrast, never did anything in a hurry,
cooked from scratch and never got a permanent until she was in her seventies. It impressed me that someone who was born before the airplane was invented, when everyone cooked over a woodstove and almost no one had electricity, a telephone or a car, could handle all the changes of the century through which she lived with such grace. But my aunt, however diffident she may have seemed, had a very clear notion of who she was, and changes beyond her doorstep seemed to affect her not at all, perhaps because she had seen so much of it.

It was from my aunt that I first learned the lesson that the people you know best, or think you know best, can with the turn of a phrase or a trick of the light seem altogether mysterious, leaving you to wonder if anything you thought you knew is true. When I spent the night at my uncle and aunt’s house, I was usually asleep long before my aunt turned in, but on those rare occasions when for some reason I couldn’t sleep, she would let me watch her take her hair down and comb it out. She wore it long, halfway down her back, but during the day she kept it tucked into a neat bun until it was time for bed. Watching her take out the comb and the pins that held everything in place and then watching her hair fall like smoke around her face was like watching a magic trick, because with her hair down, she looked quite different: younger, less sharply defined, but more present somehow, more vulnerable, enough to make it seem as though the version of herself that she showed the world for most of her waking life were nothing more than a screen, a way of putting distance between herself and that world. Seeing her at her mirror with the brush moving through her hair always made me catch my breath a little. It was like encountering a stranger in the house at bedtime.

Most nights, though, hours before she finally turned off the kitchen light and went to bed herself, she put me to sleep with a
back rub and a Bible story. The tales she told, in a soft, hypnotic voice, sounded oddly violent coming from the mouth of someone so mild, but I think it was just that she knew what I wanted to hear: David and Goliath, Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho, Jesus walking on water and manufacturing loaves and fishes sufficient for a crowd of five thousand. I never went to sleep before she finished, and always begged for one more story. More often than not I got it. We had a catchphrase that we used only on each other: “I’m going to pester you.” She deployed it with mock ferocity to coax me through a chore, to get me out of the tub, to get me to finish my dinner. At night, in bed, I took it up, pestering her not to stop telling stories. It was a little like a secret code, a way of talking that only we shared. We certainly never pestered anyone else.
Pester
was the first word I remember thinking of
as a word
, worrying its mustardy sound over my tongue, saying it in private until it became nonsense. I’ve never known anyone else who said it, certainly not the way we said it: chanted back and forth, something said over and over just for the fun of saying it, and I made the game go on as long as I could. I didn’t want her to leave, not before I fell asleep, and usually she accommodated me, turning off the little lamp beside my bed and sitting there in the almost dark with just the light from the hall coming through the half-closed door, whispering to me. Sometimes it was something from the Psalms, or just a phrase or a sentence, dreamily spoken over and over, as though she, too, were drifting off. (What did she say? I wish I could remember. But all that’s left is the comforting sound of her voice, light and soft, like an extra blanket.) If she got to the door before I was asleep, I would try to hold her there as long as I could by saying, “Love you the most.” Then we said that back and forth there in the dark, playing catch with words until I was too sleepy to go on.

  Matinee Idyll