by Jim Kokoris
“Teddy,” I said.
“Teddy,” he said. He walked over and extended his hand. “Put ’er there, little millionaire. Little multimillionaire. I’m Uncle Frank.” Then he said quickly and seriously, “Your father’s brother. Your father’s only brother.” He took a step back and studied me, nodding his head. “Bet you didn’t know you even had an uncle, did you?” he said smiling again. “But you do,” he winked and pointed a finger at me. “You most certainly do.”
Since it was late, I was not allowed to stay up and visit with him. So I slowly brushed my teeth and washed my face as Uncle Frank and my father had a late dinner downstairs. I then went and lay on my bed for close to an hour, waiting for Aunt Bess to make her way upstairs and into her room. When she finally did, I ventured out into the hallway and sat down on the sixth step, a location that allowed me to observe without being noticed. Because of where I was sitting, shielded for the most part from the dining room by a wall, my father, who was sitting on the other side of the table, could not see me. If he knew I was up at this late hour, he would not approve. Uncle Frank could easily see me however, if he turned his head, but he seemed oblivious to my presence.
“This gets me sick,” Uncle Frank was saying. He was holding a copy of the newspaper that Aunt Bess had bought at the supermarket. It had a picture of the Nose Picker, my father, and me on the cover with the headline: DEAD WIFE SPEAKS BEYOND THE GRAVE—“PLAY MY LOTTERY NUMBERS!”
“They should have at least paid you for the photo.”
My father said nothing. Uncle Frank put down the paper.
“This is the way its going to be, Theo. Get used to it. Every asshole, every Joe Shmoe. Every Tom, Dick, and Mary is going to be coming after you. Leeches, leeches, Theo,” Uncle Frank said.
I heard my father sigh, then say, “My comments during the press conference were, well, I regret them. They’e had . . . repercussions. Yes. It’s been distressful.”
“You have to be careful about who you tell your story to,” Uncle Frank said.
“My story?” my father asked. “It’s not much of a story really.” Then I heard him clear his throat, which was his way of not talking about something he didn’t want to talk about. “So,” he said. “How is the movie business, Frank?”
“Don’t ask. My last film cost me. Cost me big. People don’t respect the genre,” he said. “There just aren’t that many outdoor theaters anymore.”
I found my uncle’s sudden appearance in our lives extremely exciting. He was shorter and slightly younger than my father, with wavy, thick black hair, a sharp nose, and a large jaw that he thrust at the people he chose to talk to. It was his voice, though, that distinguished him. It was loud and deep and strong in an unfamiliar but reassuring way. I had heard little about his work in Hollywood, though he had once sent me a poster of a movie he produced, Centerfold Shewolves. My father was upset when he saw the poster and immediately made me take it down from my bedroom wall. He never mentioned Uncle Frank to me.
“What are you going to be doing with the money?” Uncle Frank asked.
“Truthfully, I don’t know, yet,” my father replied. “I haven’t been able to focus properly It all seems very, well, very removed from me still.”
“Where is it now?”
“What?”
“Where is the money now?”
“Oh, it’s in the bank. The Bank of Wilton. In our savings account.”
Uncle Frank shook his head. “The Bank of Wilton? You mean it’s just sitting there? Jesus, Theo. You have to be a little more sophisticated than that. You should have some of it in the market. Invest it.”
“Invest it? Well, why?”
“For the future.”
“I think we have more than enough for the future, Frank.”
Uncle Frank shook his head again. “Well, we can talk about this later. But we should consider some specific options.”
“Options?” my father asked. “May I ask, what kind of options?”
“I’m not really sure yet. Land probably. Commercial real estate. There are some other things we can go into later. I have some ideas I want to bounce off you. Cattle.”
“I’m sorry, cattle?”
“Cows, bulls. A few herds.”
Just then the phone rang. Even though my father had changed our number, it rang constantly, filling our answering machine with sad, desperate, and sometimes angry voices, all asking and wanting.
“Let me get this one,” Uncle Frank said. He disappeared from view as he walked into the kitchen. Then I heard him say, “Yes it is. This is his butler.”
“Frank, please be polite,” my father whispered. “It might be a neighbor.”
“Listen,” my uncle said to the caller in his deep voice. “I don’t care how many veterans went blind in Vietnam. I served two tours in ’Nam and I didn’t go blind.” Then he slammed down the phone.
“Frank!” my father said, appalled. “That was rude. And you weren’t in Vietnam.”
“And neither was that guy on the phone,” Uncle Frank said, returning to his seat. “Remember, Theo, there’s people out there whose full-time job just became trying to get your money. Con artists, thieves, crooks. Everyone who calls you from now on is going to be blind, deaf, dying, paralyzed, impotent.” He stopped here. “You can’t trust anyone anymore. No one.”
“All I’m saying, Frank, is that I urge you to be polite,” my father said.
Uncle Frank shook his head and laughed softly. “Theo, you’re too rich to be polite.”
“Frank,” my father said. “I appreciate your coming all the way from Los Angeles to help me in my . . .” My father paused. “My hour of need. But I ask that you respect my wishes as long as you are in my house.”
Uncle Frank crossed his legs and looked at his shoe for awhile. “Okay, okay,” he said, “point well taken.” He picked up his glass of wine and slowly began to swirl it. “So,” he said. “When are you moving?”
“Moving?” my father sounded surprised. “We’re not moving.”
“You’re not going to stay here, are you? I mean in this house?”
“It’s a perfectly fine house.”
Uncle Frank waved his hand. “That’s just the point. It’s a perfectly fine house. You can afford a perfectly perfect house now. A huge house. A pool. Ten pools. A pool in every room. Anything you want. Jacuzzis, a steam room, extra toilets. This house only has three bedrooms. You don’t even have a guest room.”
“I don’t anticipate having many guests,” my father said.
“What do you call me?” Uncle Frank said. “Looks like I have to sleep in the basement.”
My father didn’t reply. I heard him get up and begin to clear the table of dessert dishes. My father didn’t like to talk at length. Questions, in particular, made him uncomfortable, throwing off his equilibrium, which always seemed to be in a delicate state. When asked a direct question, his body would stagger a bit as if he were trying to regain his footing on a slippery surface. Uncle Frank didn’t appear to know any of this, however. He just kept talking and my father kept slipping.
“The problem with you, Theo,” he said, “the problem with you is that you’re too nice. You’re too nice to be this rich. If you’re going to survive, you’re going to have to develop a little edge. A little attitude. A little anger.”
“I don’t understand.” My father was back in the dining room, clearing more dishes. “I don’t have much reason to be angry. I won an enormous amount of money. With whom should I be angry exactly?”
“Angry at people. It’s your turn to get even.”
“Even with whom?”
“With everyone. Everything.”
“I’m sorry, Frank, I don’t understand.”
Uncle Frank appeared upset. He quickly uncrossed his legs and pointed a finger in the direction of my father. “People used to laugh at us growing up. They looked down at us. I’ll never forget that. Never.”
My father’s voice sounded confused. “People looked do
wn at us? In what way? In what way do you mean, exactly?”
“The only way it mattered. Down their noses. You never noticed anything. You always were hiding behind some book. Have you forgotten the fact that we used to take in other people’s laundry?”
My father paused before speaking, “We owned a chain of dry cleaners, if that’s what you mean,” he said.
“Well, I call that pretty humble. We started from nothing. All those goddamn kids’ fathers were doctors and lawyers. Orthodontists. You never saw the hurt and the pain in Mom’s eyes when she didn’t get invited to all their parties. The closest she ever came was using Woolite on their goddamn clothes afterwards.”
“I think you’re dramatizing a bit,” my father said,
“Am I?” Uncle Frank asked. Then he drained his glass of wine and said angrily, “We were like sharecroppers, for chrissakes. Greek sharecroppers. Do you remember Debbie Cabot Swanson? Do you remember her and her whole goddamn Pilgrim-ass Wasp family? Do you remember her sisters? They all looked like Julie Andrews?”
“No, well yes, yes I do. They lived down the block from us. They had that large house with, with the . . .”
“A gazebo. They had a goddamn Wasp gazebo. Their house was like a goddamn plantation. I’m surprised they didn’t own slaves, for chrissakes. Do you remember how she used to treat you and me? Do you remember what that bitch said to you when you asked her to the prom?”
There was a long silence coming from my father’s end of the room. “No, no, I don’t,” he finally said. “That was quite a while ago. I don’t recall anything about anything like that.”
“Well, I do. She said, I don’t go out with people like you.’ Do you remember her saying that? People like you.”
“I don’t recall ever asking her on a date. I don’t recall ever speaking to her. I think you’re confused on this point, Frank. I believe it was you who asked her out, asked her on a date. Yes, I believe it was you.”
“People. Like. You.”
My father was quiet again. Then he said, “Frank, I’m afraid you’ve had too much wine.”
“I haven’t had enough,” Uncle Frank said. He reached over for the bottle and poured more wine, filling his glass to the brim. “You know, big brother, we have a different perspective on life, different, well, different world views, so to speak. Remember, I didn’t go to Harvard like you. I went to the school of hard knocks.”
“Oh, Frank, please, not this again. You went to Stanford.”
“It’s not Harvard,” Uncle Frank said quickly “It doesn’t get the same reaction at parties.”
I heard my father walk back into the kitchen and then return again.
“Let’s face it, big brother,” Uncle Frank said. “We were the Joads. We were the goddamn grape-picking Joads. And now it’s our turn for the gazebo, Theo. It’s our turn.”
“Yes, well. I think I’m going to bed,” my father said as I ran back upstairs.
That night I tried to draw my father again. I had tried many times before, but I could never capture that faraway look, that distance that separated him from the rest of the world.
Before the accident, my father didn’t have much to do with our lives. Though he was always polite, he seemed continually startled by our presence and awkward at family functions, of which there were few. He frequently ate dinner alone after we were in bed and could go days without saying much more than a few words when our paths did cross. He displayed little interest in our activities and even less affection toward us. This apparent indifference led me to a sad conclusion: he did not love us like my mother had.
On all levels, he was a mystery. He certainly was smart; he was regarded as one of the country’s leading authorities on the Civil War and his book, A Civil War Companion, never went out of print. But despite his intelligence, he lived in a fog, a slumber from which I wanted to wake him. I wanted him to be like the other parents of Wilton who seemed to be in a constant state of family frenzy, shuttling back and forth between soccer games and birthday parties, laughing and talking. Yet these simple things were beyond him. He was trapped, it seemed, in a remote place and accepted his fate with a hopeless inevitability that frustrated, worried, and sometimes angered me.
I could not count on him for much. He frequently got lost when he drove, misplaced his wallet and keys almost daily, and drifted off in the middle of most conversations. His wardrobe and total disregard for clothes bordered on the ridiculous. He seldom wore socks that matched and his ties and suits all had a tired, mothball look and smell about them that used to embarrass my mother, who took pride in her appearance. Once in the third grade, he picked me up at school, a rare event, wearing a very short, tight-fitting white jacket whose sleeves barely extended past his elbows. As I approached him on the playground, I realized to my horror (and the amusement of my classmates) that he was wearing my mother’s coat. When I pointed this out to him, he was confused. “I must have taken it by mistake,” he said, then quietly took the jacket off and draped it over his shoulders, making a bad situation much, much worse. “Well, it is chilly,” he said in response to my pleading glares.
While he was hopelessly disorganized, he was also very rigid in his routines. He ate his meals, worked in his study, and read the New York Times at the exact same times everyday. He had no hobbies that I knew of, no close friends, demonstrated no great acts of charity nor had any real temper.
He did love my mother though, that much was clear. Many times I would see him staring at her while she was working in the yard or cleaning the kitchen. Once he shocked us all by presenting her with a dozen roses at dinner for no reason other than it had been a sunny day, he said. He had a soft look in his eye when he watched her, a look I came to recognize. Men always stared at my mother. She was quite beautiful.
After she died, my father stopped talking entirely, passing the days in silence in his study or his bedroom. He communicated through notes, (“Dear Ted, Is spaghetti and a salad all right for dinner?”) which he left on the kitchen table. I never questioned his silence, I assumed it was in response to the accident and I believed that if I left him alone, he would eventually start talking again or at least begin leaving longer notes. It was during this silent time that he suffered a horrible spastic bowel attack (“Dear Ted, I have an intense pain in my backside.”) brought on, according to the doctors, by depression and stress. When we visited him at the hospital, he finally spoke to me. “Don’t worry, Teddy, I’m not going to die,” he said. “And when I get home, things will improve.” He was right. When he came home, he began talking more, inquiring about our homework and after-school activities, answering questions about the Civil War, and occasionally playing a board game with us, which was something the family therapist from the hospital encouraged him to do. Even though I could sense that he was uncomfortable with Tommy and me and that talking still required an effort on his part, things gradually seemed less sad around our house and we got by.
In bed now, I tried to draw that look of soft pain around his eyes, the pain that I knew he felt every day, but I couldn’t. Giving up, I slid my sketch pad back under my bed and lay down. When I closed my eyes, I could see my father’s face perfectly
THE NEXT MORNING, Uncle Frank offered to take me and the Nose Picker to school. My father was hesitant.
“They usually walk,” he said. Any type of change from our routine caused great confusion for him.
“I rented a Lexus for a couple of days,” Uncle Frank said. “It’s nice. Besides, I always go out for breakfast. Always. I can’t eat breakfast at home. What would I eat?” My father reluctantly relented only after he wrote detailed directions to St. Pius on a piece of paper, which Uncle Frank stuffed casually in his pocket without so much as a glance.
Once in the shiny black car, Uncle Frank looked at his watch.
“What time does school start?”
“Eight-thirty,” I said. The leather seats of the car felt slick and cool on the backs of my arms. I made a mental note to replace our red Je
ep with a Lexus on my List of Things.
“Eight-thirty or eight-thirtyish?” Uncle Frank asked. “Is there some leeway there? Some give and take? A little wiggle room?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant so I said, “Eight-thirty in the morning.”
He nodded. “Well,” he said. “What would you say if your favorite uncle took you to breakfast?”
“Yeah,” the Nose Picker said.
“But we’ll be late,” I said, even though I had no overwhelming desire to go to school.
“What’s a few minutes? I’m always late. I like to make an entrance. In L.A. I’m always thirty minutes, an hour, late, whatever. I want people to be relieved and excited to see me. It’s an art. The more important you are, the later you can be. You two guys should start practicing it. Everyone can start waiting for you now,” he said as he pulled into the parking lot of Will’s Pancake House. “Hell, I’ll wait for you.”
Once in the restaurant, Uncle Frank looked concerned. “No way they have cappuccino here, no way,” he said gloomily as he looked around the tired and dark coffee shop. “They probably don’t even have fresh-squeezed orange juice here. Out in L.A., I always have fresh-squeezed. Always. With pulp. I’m not afraid of pulp.”
Uncle Frank fell quiet for a few moments and I suspected that he was thinking about all the fresh orange juice with pulp that was being consumed by other fearless people that very moment back in Los Angeles.
“Well, anyway, I’m sure they have good pancakes,” he said, as we slid into the booth by the window. Outside, I could see traffic, moving slowly. Uncle Frank picked up his fork and knife and squinted at them, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, these things are infected. They may as well give us dirty syringes to eat with.” He started wiping them furiously with his napkin.