THE UNREMEMBERED

THE UNREMEMBERED

He came into the kitchen stooped over, as he could not straighten himself from a sitting position.  He didn’t use a cane to support his upper half, and the strain of standing and walking that way was apparent on his face.  His white hair was uncut, long enough to hang over his ears and in back almost touch his shoulders.  It did not hang limply over his eyes but rather shot up almost straight above his forehead, and although his hair had thinned a great deal, it made him look wild and insane.  Embarrassed for him, his wife tried to smoothen his hair down, laughing as she did so.  Bent in half and stepping cautiously through the doorway from the parlor of his little house, he reached out his shriveled hand and roared hellos in his gravelly voice, which made the large mass of loose pink skin under his chin quiver.  

     The child who had come into the kitchen with her grandfather to visit her great granduncle was a month shy of two years old.  Her grandfather was still rather physically fit, and as he and her grandmother were the only elderly the child had thus far known in her brief life, she had no experience to help her understand her great granduncle.  She looked up into his wild hair, his pallid face, and his seemingly tortured frame, and formed some kind of idea that prompted her to scream.  As the claw-like hand of the bent man tried to tap her on the head, the child, perhaps thinking herself about to be touched by some horror of existence that consumes little girls, shouted in alarm, sidestepped the aged hand, and shot in two quick steps behind her grandfather’s legs, which she clung to as one might a tree trunk in a hurricane.

As a youth in Brooklyn, the bent old man was excessively fat and was rejected because of his fatness by the draft that might otherwise have put him in uniform and sent him to war.  This fatness was not the result of gluttony but was a curse of his chemistry and a cause of much suffering and loneliness in those formative years when we are most in need of the companionship of friends.  As a middle and late teen he lived at home with his father and three sisters, from whom he received those sympathies that made his daily life tolerable.  School was the arena of his miseries, where the desks others slid into could not hold him, and he had to sit on the side of the classroom in a straight-backed chair and place his reader on his knees and scribble awkwardly in a notebook he had no other place to rest than on his massive belly.  Prefatory to those torments was the lonely walk up the elm-shaded blocks when he was abandoned by his sisters as they joined their friends coming shouting and laughing from the homes they passed.

     It was, however, the stares and the amusedly crinkled eyes of the girls that caused his most painful sufferings.  He understood at the time when boys come alive to girls that they were not for him, that he would never know them, that this part of life would have to be lived in dreams, but he learned also from the silent witnessing of laughing eyes that dreaming of girls only added to his suffering, so he turned away from them, repressed his longings, and replaced them with another desire—the desire to make money, to get rich, and thus to make up for what he missed in life.

     His sisters on the other hand suffered from no such deformity as his.  They attracted men, had their romances and their weddings, and nestled into homes on the Island near the bay and the ocean beaches and entered the routines of motherhood.  What family pleasures he knew came from them, from their dinner tables and living rooms, their children, especially those for whom he stood as godfather, and their husbands.  When the sisters all left their father’s house, he became the prime companion and caregiver to the needy old man, and remained so until his father died at the extremely ripe age of ninety-eight, at which time he had himself passed into the first stages of old age.  It was, however, exactly at this time that his life began to offer the promise of some fulfillment. 

     In middle age, he had sought out help from medicine to overcome his obesity.  By this time there were remedies, and they worked for him.  He was short of stature and rather delicate, so that the huge strain of weight on his frame left traces that could not be erased, and these appeared as deformities of skeleton and draperies of skin that could not be hidden by clothes.  He did, though, eventually achieve a normal weight for one his height and age, and this made a huge difference in his life.  But he nevertheless continued to live in his father’s house and to companion and care for the old man.  He worked and prayed, visited his sisters’ families, cooked modest meals for himself and his father, and entertained himself by nursing his bank accounts and investments. 

     These, his bank accounts and investments, became for him the ultimate meaning of his life.  Although they compensated by their accumulation and hold on his imagination, they were otherwise meaningless, since their existence was what he wanted, not their use—use of his wealth was anathema to him.  A reduction of one of his accounts would cause more suffering than any pleasure the spending could possibly bring.  Pleasure never entered his calculations for living.  Only allaying suffering did.  So that, although he himself never felt and therefore never understood the impoverishment of unused wealth, he nevertheless suffered from it.  But this eccentricity became legend among his nieces and nephews and a source of irritation among his sisters, who in times of need sought assistance from him, and who were always frustrated by what they considered his miserliness.

     It was at the time of his father’s death that life began to change for him.  There was a woman in his neighborhood about the same age as him who also never married.  Encountering each other in the neighborhood markets and on the sidewalks as they came and went from their Brooklyn homes, they knew of each other’s existence but never had occasion to meet.  

     She went to his father’s funeral and wrote a sympathetic note in a card which she handed to him.  He found her responsive when he tried to talk to her.  Nearing sixty, he felt he had no time to spend on courtship and on the usual customs of dating to get to know her.  So one day he called her and asked her flat out if she wished to pursue a relationship with a view to getting married.  She didn’t even pause to think.  She said she did.  So he began taking her to visit his sisters, and they and their husbands and adult children were delighted in her.  The marriage took place.  They sold both their houses in Brooklyn and moved east to Valley Stream.  They were happy.  Theirs was what we may call a twilight happiness, a happiness which, because it came late in their lives and could not in the nature of it bear fruit in the form of children, was for those very reasons more precious and satisfying.

     On this day, when the little girl screamed at the sight of him, his nephew came from out of state to spend a little time with all his still living aunts and uncles and visit his brothers and sisters.  He brought with him his daughter and granddaughter so the family could meet the little girl.  This day was to be spent with his uncle and aunt.

His white hair wildly askew, his bent frame causing him to stumble as he walked, he lurched toward the little girl with a laugh and reached to tough her head, which he gently patted, and which she allowed by closing her eyes and clinging even tighter to her grandfather’s leg. 

     “You’re scaring her to death, you old coot,” his wife chastised with a chuckle, “I told you they’d be here any minute.”  Addressing her grandniece, she apologized, “It’s hard to get him to move anymore.  You can see!”

     “That’s OK, Aunt Kitty, we are kind of barging in.  We only have this one day to spend with you.  Tomorrow we go to dad’s sister’s, then after that to the Aunts in Nesconset.  Then to the airport.  Good thing we got to the beach yesterday.”

     In order to avoid imposing on them, their nephew had insisted on going for take-out Chinese or take-out anything they liked for lunch.  The uncle wanted pizza, and in spite of the difficulty of getting in and out of a car, he insisted on going with his nephew, so they left together.  Before leaving, the uncle threw on with his usual contortions a dark-gray blazer which covered the old plaid shirt he favored, open at the collar, out of which white chest hair curled in great abundance.   His wife shrieked and pleaded with him to stay home, but he brushed her off.  Bent in half, hanging onto his nephew’s arm, the hair on his head still wildly askew, they looked like a pair of lunatics escaping the white jackets. 

     During their absence, the little girl, relieved of the presence of the frightening old man, settled down and became very social with her great grandaunt.  There was little for her to do, there not being babies in the family for a long, long time.  So she explored, running into all the rooms, looking at the framed photos, and coming to her old great grandaunt every once in a while and offering up a smile.

     “It’s too bad you and uncle can’t travel anymore.  We’d love to have you stay with us for a while.  We have the room, you know,” the child’s mother said.

     “I’m just an ‘in-law,’ you know.  ‘Out-law’ your father’s brothers and sisters say.  He’s not my blood, your father’s uncle.  So when I say yes, it’s too bad we can’t visit you, you have to know I really want to and would.  It’s my dear husband, that bent over madman, who will not part with the money to buy tickets.”

     “That’s so sad, Aunt Kitty!  Come by yourself then.  Maybe if you threatened to come by yourself, he’d up and come with you.”

     “Oh, no, he wouldn’t!  It’s not because he doesn’t care.  Believe me, your coming here is like a vacation to him.  You can’t imagine how excited he was when your father called and said you were coming.  He was so excited he couldn’t move.  That’s why he was such a mess when you came in.  I should have brushed his hair myself, but he gets upset when I try to do that.  What can I do?  He is who he is and he’s not going to change.”

It was a refulgent July Long Island day, humid and heating up after noon.  Through the windows the mild breeze carried the scent of the bay, the tidal odors of salt and slightly brackish waters.  When the table was cleared, the old uncle, instead of closing the windows and turning on the air conditioning, suggested they all go sit on the patio, which was shaded by a pergola over which grape vines crawled.  Aunt Kitty protested, but the old man insisted, so they broke out the lawn chairs from the garage, took their drinks outside, and let the child spend some energy by running around the yard, which was fenced and bordered by flower beds, and in the center of which was a small, raised garden in which the old man planted tomatoes and herbs.  The garden was raised the height of three railroad ties, high enough that the old man didn’t have to bend any further than his ordinary condition to tend to his plants. 

     The tomatoes, just beginning to turn color, were out of reach of the little girl, who tried to climb up the ties to reach for them.  The old great granduncle, alarmed she might fall or dirty her knees, struggled out of his lawn chair and stepped across the grass to reach for her.  Her back was to him as he touched her, and when she turned and saw it was him, her eyes widened in fright and she screamed.  Everyone laughed, even the old man, but his face showed the frown of rejection and the hurt that used to sit on him like a grief when he was young, and which no one present could recognize or interpret.

     So he left her there, half way up, and returned to his chair.  Her mother called to her, and she obediently dropped to the grass and tripped to her mother’s side.  She wore a sun hat that had a green and white checked dome and a large, floppy, red and white checked brim, which was tied under her chin.  The large, floppy brim darkened her face, which was already shaded by the pergola.  But her large eyes gleamed from under the hat, and these she trained on the old man, sitting now in the lawn chair and looking more nearly normal.

     “Sophie,” her great granduncle said to her, “come to uncle, come and sit on my lap and talk to me.”

     She just stared at him, neither shaking her head nor moving a foot.  Everyone could see the intensity of her stare and so no one spoke.

     “Come, Sophie,” the old man pleaded, a note of something in his voice that appealed to the child. 

     She looked into his face and one could see in hers how much she wrestled with the impulse to go to him and her fear of him.

     “Look, Sophie, if you come and sit on my lap, I’ll give you some money.”

     This was a shameless bribe, and everyone laughed, which lightened the mood of the moment and, although she didn’t understand, lightened her mood too.

     The old man leaned to his side and slipped his wallet out of his back pocket, opened it and, with index finger and thumb, lifted out a twenty dollar bill.  The denomination meant nothing to the child, but recognizing that it was meant for her, she overcame her fear and stepped across the patio to the old man’s knees.  He gave her the bill, which she clutched to her chest as though she had been given a great prize.  She let him lift her onto his left knee, and he patted her head and bounced her up and down, and laughed, and laughed.

     “It’s the first time I ever paid for the affections of the opposite sex,” he said, guffawing, making everyone laugh with him.  The child beamed, clutching her twenty-dollar bill. 

     In a few days she would leave Long Island.  She would not remember the day she met her great granduncle, nor how afraid she was of him, and how she made him grieve.  Her own grandfather might tell her about it in years to come, but it would not mean anything to her.  An old photo of a perfect stranger.  Tales of an eccentric, bent old man.  Someone from the past.