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My UnclesDecember 25, 2009 I've been dragging my feet about posting this piece of To Be Rather Than to Seem, mostly because it's the longest one so far. Today being Christmas Day, I recalled that I had chickenpox on Christmas when I was five years old, mumps on Christmas when I was six, and measles on Christmas when I was seven, and that on each of these occasions there was an uncle who hadn't had the ailment in question so either he couldn't stop by on Christmas or I had to absent myself when he appeared. I'm fuzzy about that part. I'm also not sure that my pediatric records would bear out my recollection about the exact dates, but this is the way I've remembered it at least since high school. In any case, Christmas, contagious diseases, and the uncles are all linked in my memory, My two grandmothers had three children apiece. Grandma, my father's mother, gave birth to three boys within three and a half years. Maybe she wanted to get her childbearing obligations out of the way as quickly as possible; since "help" was available, she didn't have to drive herself crazy to do it. Grandmummie's second child, my mother, was born five years after her first, and the third came ten years after the second. My mother said it was like having three only children in the same family. Since my father and my mother each had two brothers, I was born with four uncles and no aunts. Three of the four -- Neville, Nat, and Hugh -- lived within ten miles during most of my growing up, so I saw them often. Plenty of people have an uncle who never quite manages to get his feet under him and propel himself in a generally forward direction. I had three. The fourth uncle was Guy, my mother's older brother. He was cut from similiar cloth, but his life played out a little differently. Neville was my godfather as well as my uncle, and the uncle I loved best. He was sixteen months younger than my father, as my brother Roger was sixteen months younger than I, but where Roger struck off in a markedly different direction -- I had academics and world affairs sewed up from an early age, so he excelled in sports and more practical pursuits -- Neville remained in older brother Bob's shadow. Though about the same height, he seemed slighter, and where my father was robust and outdoorsy, Neville had the pale, attenuated look of someone who hides out in the upper stacks of a research library. My father graduated from Harvard and earned his graduate degree in architecture there. Neville started at Harvard but didn't finish. Neville never married; he lived in the house he grew up in for most of his adult life. This took some explaining, so the story had it that he'd gone off to World War II, come back shell-shocked, and never quite recovered. Supposedly he'd once been in love with a woman who either jilted him or died; the versions differed, and I don't remember ever hearing a name attached to this lost love. After I left home, I learned that just about everyone's unmarried male relative of that generation came with a family tale of female jilting or tragic death, and that a common motive was to divert attention from the family's suspicions that the relative in question was gay. Was Uncle Neville gay? It sure wouldn't surprise me, but these days retrofitting someone with a gay identity, when the only evidence is non-macho behavior and the absence of a female companion, distorts the person's image by imposing a definition that he wouldn't have claimed for himself. Neville might have been gay, but that doesn't explain why he lived with his mother. Neither does filial duty, or affection. When I had supper at Grandma's, she, Nev, and I would eat in the den, each with a TV dinner or other easy-to-prepare meal in front of us on a tray, and watch the six o'clock news. That's my indelible memory of Grandma and her secondborn son: both facing the flickering black-and-white TV, neither looking at or saying a word to the other. Nev had inexpensive tastes -- an annual trip to Florida for Red Sox spring training was one of his few self-indulgences -- and was able to live mostly on inherited money. In his workroom at the back of the garage, he repaired ailing record players, radios, and TVs. For a deaf couple with a newborn he invented a device that translated the sound of the baby's crying into a light that went on in the parents' room. Word about this got around, and he made them for other people too. He fixed small appliances and custom-made useful gadgets for friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. Whatever he charged, it was less than the going rate and often included delivery; I'm not sure he would have taken money at all if his clients hadn't insisted. After Grandma died, Neville cracked up. Since childhood I'd been hearing the adults refer to this or that person who'd had "a nervous breakdown." Cars could break down, but what did a human nervous breakdown look like? Even after my favorite uncle had one, I still didn't know: like the quintessential WASP that he was, Nev was discreet. He committed himself to a psychiatric hospital, and went from there to a halfway house and then a group home in Boston. I had moved back to Washington by then and didn't see him often, but I think of this period as my uncle Neville's Indian summer. He got out of his hometown and into the big city. He thrived on it. Finally he could walk to movie theaters and restaurants and get around by bus or subway. He had friends and housemates to go out with. He even held down a real job in an electronics shop. Of the three brothers he was the first to die, and at the youngest age; he didn't see his seventieth birthday. Having husbanded his money carefully, he left $300,000 to be divided equally among his six nieces and nephews. My share, stashed in certificates of deposit, has given me the cushion I needed to live as a single, catch-as-catch-can and self-employed woman on Martha's Vineyard, an otherwise precarious and probably foolish endeavor. It has made it possible for me to write what I needed to write. My uncle Nat -- Nathaniel Russell Sturgis, called Russell by his wife and most people outside the immediate family -- was two years Neville's junior. When Uncle Nat married the woman who became Aunt Cathy, I was the flower girl and my brother Roger the ring bearer. Their elder daughter, Christine, was born ten days after my sister, Ellen; Josephine, or Jojo, or, eventually, Jo, arrived a couple of years later. Nat and Cathy's daughters are my only first cousins. They never lived more than a town away, and we all gathered at Grandma's for many holiday and Sunday dinners. I should have a stronger impression of Nat as a person. Instead, he's a three-panel cartoon. In one panel he wiggles his ears, in the next he strips an ear of corn clean down to the cob, and in the third he's the helpless husband whose wife stocks the freezer with ninety days' worth of home-cooked meals before she takes her daughters back to Greece to spend the summer with her family. In my family this was a standing joke, and not meant to be flattering to either Nat or Cathy. Uncle Nat married far beyond the Pale: Cathy had come to the U.S. from Greece, a rare female "foreign" student. Grandma was very involved with the international student community of Boston and Cambridge, and grad students from all over frequently joined us for Sunday dinners at Grandma's. I think this is how Cathy met Nat, but I don't know for sure. I do know that Cathy was cast as the opportunist who had enticed the gullible youngest son of the family into marriage. During my growing up her business interests -- for years she was a travel agent -- and her materialism were much ridiculed, along with her penchant for keeping the thermostat at eighty degrees and her library, which was said to consist of the Bible, the phone book, and the Boston Social Register. Uncle Nat, like Uncle Neville, inclined more to the trades than to the professions, but unlike Nev, he held down a regular job as a car mechanic -- at which he almost certainly earned more than my father did as an architect. Hindsight is, if not 20/20, at least closer to it than the distorted image I had at the time: Aunt Cathy was largely responsible for keeping Nat organized and employable. Like Uncle Neville, Uncle Hugh, my mother's younger brother, never married. I don't recall ever hearing a family explanation for this; he was too young to have been shell-shocked in the war. He did come with a story that was meant to explain his idiosyncrasies: his father, my Grandpop, frequently called him a "mistake" because he'd appeared ten years after my mother. Whose mistake was never specified. My mother believed this had a decisive effect on Hugh's character. My mother, however, tended to latch on to essentialist explanations for human characteristics. She envied Grandma her "green thumb" and was sure she herself didn't have one, though she presided over an array of flourishing houseplants. If you didn't have a green thumb, whatever success you had with growing things had to be a fluke. However Hugh internalized his father's frequent reminders that he was "a mistake," it was more complicated than my mother was willing to acknowledge. From where I stand now, it looks as though he tried hard to break out, break the curse, chart his own course. A journalist, he worked for the New Bedford Standard-Times. He was fascinated by the paranormal and did his own research into it. At one point I heard he was trying to develop a psychically scientific way of handicapping racehorses. I didn't know what to make of this: Was there something to it? Did he have more than average psychic ability? Or was this a wild goose chase, an attempt to hit the jackpot without putting in the grunt work? When I was well launched into adulthood, Hugh rented a room for a while in my parents' house. During that time -- he was in his fifties -- he went to nursing school. Later he moved in with his mother. As with my uncle Neville and his mother, this was not a match made in heaven. According to my mother, Hugh once showed up at Grandmummie's front door and told her he wanted to kill her. As I understood it, this was a confession rather than an expression of intent. While he was living in Grandmummie's house, he either sleep-walked out of or fell from a second-story window. Mummie wasn't sure which, or whether he was trying to kill himself. I doubted that anyone who wasn't totally strung out would try to kill himself by jumping out of a second-story window. Hugh did serious hospital time for that one. He had no money and no insurance; as far as I know, the state covered it. He recovered. Grandmummie spent her last few years in a nursing home and died a week short of her 105th birthday. The state picked up most of the tab for her care, too, and would have been reimbursed after the sale of her house had Hugh not been living in it. Hugh was indigent, and Hugh had nowhere else to go. So (and I'm not entirely sure why it worked out this way) Grandmummie's estate was settled according to her will, with half going to Hugh -- her only surviving child -- and the other half split evenly among the four grandchildren. So once again I benefited financially from the haplessness of an uncle. Hugh and Mummie's elder brother, Guy, was the avuncular anomaly. Guy lived in Norwalk, Connecticut, and worked for Pan Am. I met him for the first time when I was eleven, at Grandpop's funeral. His absence from our lives, my mother and grandmother made clear, was the fault of his wife, Maudie, who, in their view, kept Guy away from his family. Aunt Cathy was ridiculed, but Maudie was vilified -- I never met her, and I was never prompted to call her Aunt Maudie. The supreme villain was Maudie's mother, Mrs. Milar (pronounced "my-lar"), who was thought to exert sinister power over her daughter and, through her daughter, over poor Guy. Eventually Maudie died -- Mrs. Milar, I believe, had passed earlier -- and Guy married Jean. Jean was wonderful, everybody loved Jean -- not least because Jean restored Guy to his family. I can't tell you offhand when all of this happened, only that it was after I left home. Growing up I took the story at face value, more or less, but I didn't think much about it; Guy was the invisible uncle and hence not of great interest. Later, when I started trying to puzzle out the silences, the rages, the strange incapacities of my relatives, the story became very interesting indeed. It eventually dawned on me that absent a loaded gun or profound financial dependence, it is generally very difficult for one adult to prevent another from doing something he or she seriously wants to do. If Uncle Guy had wanted to spend time with his parents, siblings, or nieces and nephews, he would have found a way. Through my adult life I wasn't exactly estranged from my parents; I did keep my distance, for fear of being sucked back into the depression that had nearly paralyzed me after I returned from England and lived in Grandma's house. Did Guy stay in Norwalk for similar reasons? Did Maudie sense that her marriage would only succeed if she could keep her husband away from the family's gravitational pull? If Cathy and Maudie had ever been able to compare notes on their husbands, my uncles, I wonder what they would have said.
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