Coastal Florida at that time was much as one might have imagined it, and, I suspect, much as people would have liked it — people who, like my father’s family from Virginia and my mother’s from Tennessee, moved south to get in on one of the miniature economic booms, which, during the forties, fifties, and sixties, spurred growth and brought jobs to the developing seaside sprawl. Florida in those long-gone days was, as I remember it, a realm of tannin-black rivers and crystal springs; of live, unpolluted oyster beds two feet under the shallow bay and estuary waters; of red tile roofs showing here and there above the royal palms and the mangrove thickets that opened onto white beaches accessible by humpbacked bridges that were always crowded, in the magic hours before sundown, with fishermen reeling in grouper, snapper, and snook. What I remember most from my early childhood in Florida is an intensity of color both in and above the water, as clouds swept eastward over the ocean, bringing afternoon showers that could begin with a few drops carried on the wind, then abruptly open up and rain down, flooding the streets, the sidewalks, the lawns and tennis courts, the entire world it seemed to me, before eventually, after little more than an hour or two, blowing inland. Often, during storms, a greenish cast of light filled the subtropical sky over Siesta Key, infusing the palm fronds and the leaves of the trees with an even brighter green, yet turning the gulf and the bay, into whose low swells gulls and pelicans were forever diving, a deep, almost olive shade that I have never seen in water anywhere else.
But what about my taciturn grandfather and his taciturn brother? Legend has it that, on a certain slow pilgrimage to Titusville or Arcadia, they pulled into one of the ubiquitous roadside places where plaster birdbaths and imitation Greek and Roman statuary got sold to migrants and retirees with delusions of grandeur. Using as few words as possible, the brothers asked the owner what he thought his inventory might be worth in cash. The owner told them that he imagined the entire stock might be worth about forty dollars. Without another word, the brothers produced the forty dollars, a twenty-dollar bill apiece, a grand amount for workingmen in the years immediately following the Second World War. They started the car and drove wordlessly down the road about a quarter mile — I don’t know which of them, Robert or Frank, was at the wheel — then turned the car around, motored back up the highway, steered into the entrance to the lot, and plowed through the statues at some remarkably low velocity, destroying every one. It is hard to know how to judge this story, particularly given that neither brother was much of a talker; and so I wonder who first told about the roadside stand and their fraternal telepathy and the pulverized birdbaths, and to whom. I find the tale pleasing.
All things considered, it seems that Bob — or, I should say, Eldridge — never had optimum chances for success in life. In addition to the difficulties imposed by an eccentric father and an imperious mother, he had to contend with his older brother, my father. In stories my mother told about him, my father as a young man comes off as an intimidatingly popular and accomplished student, clearly in the most-likely-to-succeed category, and much doted on by his mother, who, removed at last to Florida, had become the Sarasota High School Latin teacher, known to her students as Old Caesar. And, in fact, Eliza Antrim had in good measure the kind of sober reserve with which urbane people carry themselves when living in environments that are essentially colonial. The same could probably have been said for Julius Caesar, keeping order by the sword in the barbarous reaches of the empire. Unlike the historical Caesar’s imperial subjects, though, my grandmother’s students eventually moved on in life, escaping her rule. Even my father, who, by becoming a professor, a professional intellectual, fulfilled in part her dreams for him, was able to marry, have children, and build a life separate from his mother. My uncle remained her vassal for life.
Here’s some of what I know. In 1958, at the age of eighteen, Eldridge left home to study literature and art at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. He painted and made drawings, but none of his work survives from this period, or from any other in his life. After college, he moved north to New York City, where he settled into an apartment in the East Seventies and enrolled in the Manufacturers Hanover Trust executive-training program. It is unlikely that he had plans to support himself as an artist by becoming a bank vice-president. Apparently, he accumulated debts, spent evenings in the bars along Second and Third avenues, and either failed or simply dropped out of the training program, though not before meeting, in his classes on retail and commercial banking, the love of his life. M. was — and is — a beautiful and intelligent woman who remained until recently a successful banker. The fact that my uncle became, subsequent to his rapid exit from corporate culture, a cabdriver and an Upper East Side doorman did not deter M., who undoubtedly saw, as people will when profoundly attached to lovers on their way to falling through the cracks, some version of him that would forever exist as Potential.
I remember M. from a trip my family took to New York when I was ten and my sister nine; and I remember my uncle in his apartment, a place I thought of frequently when I found myself living in New York, in my own small, sparsely furnished walk-up only blocks away from where he’d lived twenty years before. The highlight of that trip was an afternoon at FAO Schwarz, the world’s greatest toy store, gift certificates — presents from Uncle Eldridge — clutched in our hands. I chose, after much exploring and considering (and perhaps in awareness that it was my uncle’s dream to get his pilot’s license and fly jumbo jets), one of those plastic planes driven by a loud, buzzing engine in circular orbit around the “pilot.” It was a cheap toy airplane destined to crash and break apart when, as soon as my father got it in the air (I never flew the thing), the handheld control lines became tangled and useless, causing the plane to jerk downward and nose-dive into the ground.
At any rate, M. was very much on the scene at that time, and my sister and I pestered her and Eldridge mercilessly about their getting married — why weren’t they married? — much as we would hound them about this in the years to come, even after our uncle had given up on New York and drifted down the coast, finally returning to Florida to live in his parents’ house, in a tiny wood-paneled room crammed with guns and ammunition, British novels, all manner of sporting gear, antique toy soldiers displayed on dusty shelves, a short and narrow bed with a tartan blanket, and, stacked within easy reach of the bed, back issues of the same kinds of magazines he kept in the trunk of his car — automobile, airplane, scuba, golf, tennis, rifle, archery, and Playboy.
It may have been his room that attracted me, when I was a teenager in Miami, to my uncle’s way of life. Everything about it seemed desirable to me, because it was his, I suppose, and because everything he did spoke to adolescent pleasures.
He created the illusion that he was his own man, and free.
I was thirteen when I started riding the bus across the Everglades to visit him. I used to sit by the window and watch for alligators in the black canals beside the highway, as, in the far distance, fires lit by heat lightning burned off the dry grass and the stunted pines that grew in clusters like innumerable tiny islands rising from the shallow waters south of Naples. By this time, around 1972, my grandfather Robert Antrim had died, and my uncle had more or less abandoned any dreams he might have had of a life somewhere removed from his mother’s house. My own mother’s drinking had reached a level best described as operatically suicidal, and she and my father — married, divorced, then remarried to each other — waged their war nightly. My sister had got busy saving herself through academics. I’d got busy flunking out. Our Siamese had eaten a poisonous South American toad and was afflicted with seizures that caused her to fall down and twitch violently. The other cat had reached the age at which vomiting was chronic.
And when in the deep of the night my mother came into my room swaying, half conscious and with gray smoke from her cigarette wreathing her face, shattered by bourbon and white wine; and when she raised her hand to strike, and I easily batted her arm back, then stepped forward and qu
ickly steadied her before she tipped; when, holding my mother upright, I looked past her to see my father watching us from the shadows outside my room, whispering that he was sorry for everything — when these things happened, there eventually came a point at which feeling, or whatever it is we call feeling, broke apart in me. And though it’s true that I felt anger and shame and fear — emotions that I live with still, more than thirty years after my solitary pilgrimages to the playtime world of Uncle Bob — it was also true that I felt nothing at all. And in order to share this feeling that was not a feeling, in order to be with another person, a man, as I realize now, who was like the man I might one day become, a man drained of feeling, I boarded a bus.
The bus carried me past Frog City and the Miccosukee Indian settlements, all those alligator-wrestling parks and airboat-rental outposts. At Naples, the scenery changed, and the bus took a right turn and headed up the suburban Gulf Coast, stopping in Fort Myers, Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte, and other centerless non-towns I can’t remember the names of, continuing north toward Venice, the home of retired circus performers, crossing one bridge after another and another, over narrow inlets and motorboats moored by the hundreds, before finally arriving, after what seems in memory an endless journey, in Sarasota, the town where I was born, and where my uncle, sunburned and smelling of English Leather and the beer he’d drunk the night before, waited to greet me at the station with the one question I have been trying to answer for myself ever since: “What do you want to do?”
We got in the car. We rolled down the windows. We turned on the radio. We began to drive. After a moment, I asked him the question I always looked forward to asking upon seeing him for the first time in a long time.
“Eldridge, what are you eating?”
“Pork chops.”
“How’re you fixing them?”
“I’m broiling them.”
“What are you having with them?”
“Spinach.”
“What else?”
“Rice.”
Or:
“String beans.”
Or:
“Fries.”
It worked out, he would explain — and my uncle was forced to explain this again and again, because people loved hearing it — that, over the course of a year, eating a menu that consisted of one entree per month (scallops in March; spaghetti in April; flounder in May), he got a balanced diet.
It is easy, looking back on all this now, to appreciate the despair and the terror inherent in my uncle’s preoccupations with self-sufficiency and preparedness, at home and in his car — particularly in the car, a four-door gas guzzler not unlike a rent-a-wreck version of the cars my mother’s father drove, a car different in every respect from the one that had, at a certain moment in my uncle’s youth, defined his enthusiasm for life. That car was a sexy, cherry-red Triumph TR3 with a walnut steering wheel and a rusted-out hole in the passenger-side floor — a casualty of salt air and the Florida weather — which forced the passenger to position himself extremely carefully, especially since the Triumph’s chassis rode quite low to the road. I was only seven or eight years old when Eldridge took me for drives in that car. As he accelerated and the RPM needle flickered on the dash, I would lean carefully forward and to the left, reaching, at my uncle’s invitation, to take hold of the wheel and guide the car along a straight path down the Sarasota streets.
But back to the story of Eldridge and his things. Each morning, he went to the carport and opened the trunk of the car. He stood before the items stowed there, moving and shifting his gear, replacing sweaty tennis clothes with clean ones, improving the overall packing dynamics, while, inside the house his white-haired mother, who often stayed up all night pacing, padded from bedroom to living room to porch to kitchen, worrying whether her son and grandson might eat a little breakfast before abandoning her for a day of horsing around and playing tennis and shooting pool with the friends from the Canada Dry loading dock out by the airport.
Once he’d established that everything was in order, that we had whatever we might need if, say, the world were to blow up and all life outside our car were to be catastrophically extinguished, we were off and running. Of what were our days together made? Looking back, I would say that our days were made of desire. We had structured activities, like tennis — I had not yet wrecked my shoulder with my high-toss, low-percentage, erratic yet explosive service, the theatrical serve of a flailing boy — and less formal pastimes, like wandering into convenience stores for supplies, crossing one of the crowded bridges leading to Siesta Key and the beach, driving north and dropping in at Joel’s house, stopping over afterward at Roger’s. There always came that point in tennis when the black clouds appeared from the gulf, and the rain came down, and everyone bolted off the courts and drank water. Then, just as suddenly, the sky would clear, and the world would become loud with the sounds of seagulls calling and smaller birds chattering. The sun would emerge, and we’d pick up mid-game, aiming to avoid puddles. After the game, we would walk out to the parking lot and my uncle would open the trunk of his car.
The trunk, as I see it now, was a physical repository, a form of warehouse or armory, in which my uncle secreted aspects of himself that would become, as the years went by, forbidden, denied, historical, forgotten. The things in the trunk were symbols of whatever in our lives — his and mine — might one day be taken away, totems representing sex and sport, music and work, eating and drinking, even talking and laughing. Together, my uncle and I stood in the parking lot with our hands in our pockets, staring at the pieces of the life we desired; and occasionally I would reach in and remove something, an article of clothing, for instance, or Eldridge’s disassembled fishing rod in its case. I might hold and admire the object, then put it back in its place, after which Eldridge would close the trunk and we would walk around to the sides of the car, open the doors, and get in. Our conversations were perfect. Whenever I said to him, in language sometimes having to do with home, sometimes with school, that I wanted to escape my situation, he nodded and suggested that we drive out to Siesta Key and have a swim at the beach before the sun went down.
The last day I ever spent with him, we played doubles with Roger and Joel. From the courts we could see Sarasota Bay and, lit violet against the red sunset, the shell-shaped roof of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, known because of its paint job as the Purple Cow. After the game, my uncle and I walked to the car. As usual, we peered into, rummaged through, and slammed shut the trunk. Possibly I asked Eldridge about M. Had she been to visit? Was she coming? Did he love her? Did she love him? Would they ever get married? Why not? Then we drove to Joel’s house, in a development near Bradenton. Immediately after we’d walked in the front door, the telephone rang. Joel’s wife answered, put the phone down on a counter, and said, “Bob, it’s your mother. She’s been calling.”
It happened frequently. Within a few hours of our leaving the house, his mother began dialing numbers for bars, restaurants, people’s homes, wherever he might be found. She wanted to know when he planned to return to her. She wanted to know if he was drinking beer. She wanted to know if he would be out late. She wanted to know if he was telling her the truth. I could hear him speaking into the phone in Joel’s kitchen, answering her: “Yes, Don’s here. Yes, he’s having a good time. No, I’m not letting him drink any beer. Yes, he’s had something to eat. No, I’m not driving fast. No, we won’t be out late.” So it went. When we left Joel’s and drove with Roger and Joel and Joel’s wife in a caravan to shoot pool on the enormous pool table that happened to be pretty much the only item of furniture in Roger’s living room — in Roger’s entire house, as far as I could make out — the telephone rang and again I heard my uncle speaking to my grandmother:
“Yes, we’re playing pool. No, we’re not betting any money. Don’t worry, I won’t let him drink any beer. Yes, we’ll be home soon.”
It was around this time that I was learning, in imitation of my uncle’s adult friends, to call Eldridge Bob.
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“Bob, what are we eating?” I asked him when, later that night, after tennis and billiards, after we’d driven out Fruitville Road to the house, parked in the carport, and checked the trunk one last time, we left the world of the car and entered the realm of Eldridge and his mother.
The stove lights were on in the kitchen. On the other side of the house my grandmother moved about. I could see her in the shadows. She was a pale shadow in her blue housedress in her dark bedroom, behind sliding glass doors that opened through curtains onto the porch, where I slept on a sofa bed.
“Pork chops.”
“What are we having with them?”
“Fries.”
“All right. Is it time for Johnny Carson?”
“Just about.”
“Should I turn on the TV?”
“Turn it on,” he said. He was cooking, using the broiler and a fork. I sat in his room, where the TV was, staring at his magazines. My uncle, I remember, always had in his room a certain game for one player, Labyrinth, basically a wooden box fitted with a pivoting top, on which was fashioned a kind of maze through which the player maneuvered a steel ball. My uncle could turn the knobs and guide the ball safely through. I drank a soda and played the game for a while, and my uncle opened another beer for himself.
Eldridge was a tall and beautiful-looking man. He tanned in the sun to a reddish shade characteristic among people of Scottish descent. His forehead had a scar from the time he’d walked straight into a forklift blade. His beer gut did not detract from his appeal. He wore a gold chain. He looked as if he’d be right at home at the Playboy Mansion pool parties pictured in the magazines beside the bed.
Johnny Carson came on the television. We ate with our plates balanced on our laps. My uncle blanketed his pork chops beneath a layer of pepper. I did the same. The pork chops were dry and hard, and the pepper bounced off them. The television’s reception was fuzzy; its antenna had to be adjusted periodically. I was aware that I wanted to be like my uncle, aware as well that I wasn’t so sure about that. I complained to him about my father, who had begun to worry absurdly over my prospects, if I kept going the way I was going, for graduate school. Sometimes, when I complained, Bob taunted me for not having the courage to drop out of school altogether. I must have felt, somehow, that my uncle and his brother had, throughout their lives, been at odds with each other. Bob and I watched Carson host guest after guest. In my memory, this was the night that the comedian Steve Martin came on and stole the show with a cheap prop arrow sticking through his head. Or was it the night that Martin came out and did the half-a-beard routine?
The Afterlife: A Memoir Page 4