Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 8

  I’d learned long before to disappear to my third-floor room when I saw what was coming. I’d curl up on the bed in front of my treasured black-and-white rabbit-eared 1958 television, my trusty escape hatch, as reliable as the Gloria, the Garden, and the Riviera were, where I would watch the shows that magically took me up and away; simple, straightforward dramas and a few comedies I will remember forever, like You Bet Your Life. (Groucho Marx was one of my earliest intellectual heroes; Bobby Hitt and I said if Groucho could debate Khrushchev, he could end the Cold War.) I’d watch TV until the yelling downstairs stopped or I fell asleep, whichever came first.

  One night when I was about nine, it was not the usual crying I heard but a scream, sharper and more desperate than a yell. I hurried down the two flights of stairs to find Uncle Unger standing over Mom in the living room, a fireplace poker held above him. She was on the floor, hand raised over her head to try to protect herself.

  I ran at Uncle Unger as hard and fast as I could, tackled him around his waist, and pushed him away from my mother. He staggered but—in spite of how drunk he was—being the athlete he once had been, didn’t fall over. He looked down at me and slurred, “You, want to join the party? Welcome aboard.” (“Welcome aboard” was another of those annoying phrases that came out when he was drunk.) “We’re just starting to have some fun down here. You could learn something.”

  I pushed him again, and he staggered over to his favorite armchair. After what looked like a moment’s thought, he did a half pirouette, with one arm raised like a troubadour, and let himself fall into his chair. He easily could have hit me, or my mother, with the poker or the back of his hand, or anything, but he didn’t. He never did. No matter how drunk, he never hit me. Must have been part of that code of honor. And as much as he threatened to beat my mother, I do not believe he ever did that, either.

  I stood and stared at him in his chair as my mother got up off the floor and took a seat on the couch. “Come here,” she said to me.

  “I hate you,” I told Uncle Unger. “I hate you.”

  “Good for you, boy,” he said with a laugh. “You should hate me. I’m glad you have the gumption to say it. I watch you on the playground—you know, I can see you out there from the porch? And you never mix it up in the football games at recess, you’re usually off with Bobby Hitt. I do not cotton to that boy, so I’m glad to see you can stick up for your mother like that. Never let anyone attack someone you love.” More of the code, I guess.

  “Don’t you ever do that again,” I said.

  “Do what? Play with your mother? She’s my wife, boy. I will do with her whatever I want to do.”

  The poker had fallen to the floor. After he told me he’d do whatever he wanted to do to my mother, I walked over to the poker and picked it up. I was actually just trying to get it out of the way but he must have thought I had a different purpose in mind because he said, with what I detected as actual fear in his voice, “Easy there, boy, easy. Everything’s under control. The ship is steady as she goes.” As I replaced the poker in its stand, I felt a thrill of triumph.

  Then he seemed to start talking to himself. “The seagulls are circling the Yardarm, it’s time to put some lines in the water and defrost the steaks.”

  The Yardarm was what he called the camp—a little shingled shack where you had to pump your water and use an outhouse—that he had on Monomoy Point off Chatham, where we used to go often before he moved us to Charleston.

  I could tell he was close to passing out and that the danger was over. Before he fell asleep, I took advantage of his drunken, unguarded state and asked him what I’d always wanted to know: “Why did you move us to Charleston? Why did you take me away from Jamie and Lyndie and Duckie and Uncle Jimmy? Why couldn’t we have stayed in Chatham? I hate Charleston.”

  “Because I wanted to get away from her people,” he said, looking at my mother, “and come be with my people. Why not? I’m over sixty, I pay the bills, I’m captain of the ship, why shouldn’t I live where I want? If you have any objections, just shove off.”

  18.

  The years I was in Charleston, Uncle Unger drove a black Thunderbird. He kept it parked under a tree next to the house on East Bay St. Robert, an elderly black man who did tasks not suited to the maids Georgiana or Victoria, polished the car regularly.

  Robert and I became friends. He was a smart man and I enjoyed talking with him. He made me laugh by taking out his false teeth and showing me his bare gums.

  “Why did you lose your teeth?” I asked.

  “Just you wait, boy, you be losin’ yours one day, too.” Robert was rather slight, had white curly hair cut very short, and always wore loose-fitting short-sleeved shirts. “What you doin’ today, Mr. Ned? Mr. S. in a good mood?” he asked in a voice that was gravelly due to all the Camels he smoked. He always had a pack in his breast pocket. When he’d lean over to polish the car, I always worried they’d fall out, but they never did.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like him. He’s mean a lot of the time.”

  “I know,” Robert said, “but don’t you be tellin’ him I said that. He must have a lot on his mind, that’s all I can say. A man who has all he has, to be so disagreeable, don’t make sense, if you ask me.”

  “Is he nice to you, Robert?”

  “Boy, how long you live here? Not long, am I right? You from up north in Yankee territory, am I right?”

  “Yes, Robert, I am from Chatham.”

  “Well, I don’t know where Chatham is. Do they have any people my color up there?”

  “Oh, yes, they do. Uncle Unger’s maid was colored, and she and I and her friends were all friends.”

  “Well, you asked me if Mr. S. was nice to me. Let me ask you this. Have you ever seen a white man be nice to a colored man in this city?”

  “I don’t know, Robert. I guess I haven’t noticed one way or the other.”

  Robert grinned and took out his teeth to make me laugh. “Well, don’t you waste no time goin’ ’round checkin’, because I can tell you, you ain’t gonna find no white man bein’ nice to a colored man unless he be tippin’ him for shinin’ his shoe.”

  Robert started buffing the black T-bird with renewed vigor. “Take this car. Mr. S. love this more than he love any person of my color, that’s for damn sure.” Robert giggled at the idea. “That’s for damn sure.”

  “Does he say thank you to you for polishing the car?”

  “Whooo-wee, boy! What world you be livin’ in? He might have done so when he lived up north, but down here, that’s just not the way it’s done. He’s gotta fit in, I gotta fit in, we have our ways. I don’ mind, though. I know my place. I know my place. Lotsa young coloreds be gettin’ into all kinds of trouble these days by stirrin’ things up, that’s for sure. It’s all gonna come crashin’ down before we know what’s happenin’, I can promise you that. Now you don’t tell Mr. S. what we been talkin’ about or he fire me on the spot for sure. You promise me, Mr. Ned?”

  “Robert, you shouldn’t call me mister. I’m nine years old.”

  Robert kept buffing.

  “Does he say thank you to you for anything?” I asked.

  “Of course he does. He’s a fine Southern gentleman, mighty fine Southern gentleman. They’re all fine Southern gentlemen.” Robert laughed. “Just don’ be askin’ him why he say thank you. Because then he have to tell you it’s just another way of his sayin’ ‘I’m better than you, boy.’ ”

  “I don’t understand, Robert.”

  “Of course you don’t, and I’m glad you don’t. There’s a whole lot you better off you not understand.”

  “What did you mean when you said it’s gonna come crashing down, Robert?” I asked.

  “I mean these young people ain’t gonna sit still no more for what me and my people sat still for, that’s all. And they ain’t gonna care what price they gonna have to pay. I hope I live to see that day. But, then again, maybe not. It ain’t gonna be pretty.” He paused and looked up at the
sky. “Robert, you better shut your mouth. Mr. Ned, you promise me, you don’t say nothin’ about what I been sayin’. Promise?”

  “I promise,” I said. “Will you promise not to call me mister?”

  “You got a deal.” Robert went back to buffing.

  “How long are you gonna polish this car? It’s really shiny now.”

  “I like to take my time. What else I gonna be doin’? And after I finish makin’ this car shine bright as can be, then I start in on the brass plates on the doors. You ever see how they shine? That’s because of me, Robert. I make things shine. I stay out of trouble.” He stopped buffing for a moment and looked up. “Why am I talkin’ to you so much? I will tell you why, Mr. Ned—I mean Ned. Because I like you!”

  “I like you, too, Robert! We’re friends, aren’t we?” I put out my hand to shake.

  Robert put down his buffing cloth, wiped his hands on his dark trousers, and shook my hand. As always, I did what I’d been taught to do and made good eye contact. For the first time I noticed how yellow the whites of his eyes were and how brown the pupils. I wondered if yellow meant he was sick, but I didn’t know who to ask. If Uncle Hugh had been around, I would have asked him.

  Robert was one of the people I missed after I left Charleston, not to return for forty years.

  19.

  One night Uncle Unger got me out of bed and said it was time to go for a ride. I had no idea what time it was, but this sounded like fun, so I got dressed and went downstairs where he waited impatiently.

  “Your mother is asleep. I want to show you how fast this baby can go.”

  “OK. Why now?”

  “Because, my boy, it feels like the right thing to do. Make a man out of you. I think we can have some fun. How about that?”

  Uncle Unger stopped at the coatrack in the hallway, took a beige sweater off it, and put on one of his tweed driving caps. Outside, I got into the Thunderbird’s passenger seat, a bucket seat upholstered in red leather, while Uncle Unger got into the driver’s side.

  Soon we were on the outskirts of Charleston, heading down a country road. “Why don’t you get into the back seat and sit right behind me. You can be the navigator and keep an eye on the speedometer and tell me how fast we’re going, OK?”

  “OK.” I crawled into the back seat, taking up a post right behind Uncle Unger. The round speedometer was framed by a cylindrical piece of black plastic. The numbers were white, the background black, and a red needle pointed to the numbers.

  “Ready for takeoff?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  With a lurch, the T-bird picked up speed fast. “Read off the numbers, navigator,” Uncle Unger said.

  “Sixty,” I read, “sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, eighty.”

  “OK, good, steady as she goes. Now let’s see what she’s really got.” With that, he pushed his sneakered right foot down on the gas pedal to the floor. I could see him push back in his seat as he did it.

  The thrust threw me back but I recovered quickly. “Ninety-five!” I called out. “A hundred, a hundred five, a hundred ten!”

  We were whizzing down a pretty narrow road. We were far out of town, so remote that there were no streetlights, only the moon and stars.

  “No need to worry about cops out here.” Uncle Unger laughed. “We’re free as the air. Doesn’t it feel grand?” I remember that word, “grand.” It seemed like a strange word to use.

  We screeched as we took a corner and I was thrown across the back seat against the wall on the other side. “I’m scared. Can we slow down?”

  “You’ll get used to it, boy,” he said. “It’s good for you. Make a man out of you. Call out the number, navigator.”

  “It’s one twenty. Please, can we slow down?” The top speed listed on the speedometer was 140.

  “Just keep reading the number,” Uncle Unger said. “Do your job.”

  “It’s one twenty-five now. Please slow down. Please.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re in good hands with me.”

  I saw the keys in the ignition and thought of reaching forward between the front seats and turning off the car, but I didn’t know if that was dangerous or not. So I just held on to the back of Uncle Unger’s seat as tightly as I could. We flew past the landscape and the occasional house as the moonlight flitted between telephone poles and trees. The broken lines down the middle of the road blurred almost into a solid line, we were going so fast.

  “We could crash,” I said.

  “That’s what makes it fun. I know what I’m doing, boy. You just sit tight and enjoy the ride.”

  I don’t know how long we kept driving at 120 mph through the twists and turns of the country roads outside Charleston, but I do know that I was so tense with terror the entire time that it wore me out. I don’t know if it made a man out of me, but at least we survived to live another day.

  When he finally slowed down, he said, “Good job, navigator. You can be my crew any day.”

  At the time I hadn’t realized how drunk he was. I should have known because that’s when he did crazy things. It also makes it even more amazing that we didn’t crash.

  He was a complicated man, full of charm, brilliance, style, and genuine goodness, along with the darker side that he brought into his marriage to my mother. I never got the full story about his first wife. I knew that her name was Anne, and that she was the mother of Allison and Hope.

  In my imagination, I’ve always envisioned Unger and Anne as very much in love, but in the way the New York literary set does love: cynical, witty, hard-drinking, and without illusions. I imagined they laughed a lot, danced a lot, talked a lot, and shed few tears. I imagined they cast a cold eye on life, and on death.

  I did all this imagining as I tried to put into context the one terrible event I know did happen, the awful thing that I believe (but certainly do not know) created Uncle Unger’s darkness. One day Anne went into the kitchen in their house on Bridge Street, took a knife, and drew it across her neck. To finish the job, she walked, spurting blood, into the living room, found the pistol Uncle Unger kept in a drawer “for target practice,” and shot herself in the head.

  I didn’t learn about this until after my mother had divorced Unger, and by then he and I had no relationship, so I was never able to ask him about it. Many years later I’d ask Hope why her mother had done what she did, and Hope said she honestly didn’t know.

  What a horrible thing for Unger and his daughters to have had to live with. I do know they were people who did not lead easy lives but who kept up their spirits. He had to have had a lot of good in him to have raised such lovely daughters.

  Unger himself was not all darkness. I remember the night when I was the sickest I would ever be. At age nine, I got measles, and was covered with red dots. When nighttime came, I got hot.

  My mother put a thermometer under my tongue, and when she took it out she called, “Unger, come here! Joseph, I need you now!” “Joseph” was a term of endearment they used for each other, dating back to when they went to see Showboat on Broadway and loved the song “Ol’ Man River” sung by the character named Joe. After that musical, they started calling each other Joe or Joseph, at least when they were getting along.

  Next thing I knew, Uncle Unger was in my bedroom. He almost never came up to my bedroom.

  “His temp is a hundred and six.” I could tell from my mother’s tone of voice that 106 was not good. I could also tell I was not coming in right. I felt as if I was dreaming but I knew I was awake.

  “Let’s get him a cold washcloth,” Uncle Unger said, “and call Hugh.” I knew he meant Uncle Hugh.

  A cold washcloth appeared on my forehead and it felt wonderful. I started to play with the curtain cord next to my bed. Mom had gone but Uncle Unger sat down on the bed and stroked my cheek with his hand. “You’ll be fine, sailor,” he said.

  I liked his calling me sailor.

  “Did I ever tell you about when I was in the Secret Service?” he asked, still stroking my chee
k. Not waiting for an answer, he told me story after story that, in spite of my fever, my brain held on to, at least a couple of the details, which included “a snub-nosed revolver” and “some German spies” and “an old warehouse.” The rest of the stories disappeared into my fever, but Uncle Unger did not leave my bedside.

  Finally my mother came back and said to Uncle Unger, “Hugh’s coming over with a suppository.”

  Within minutes, Uncle Unger was turning me over, lowering my pajama bottoms, and putting something up my butt. It felt strange but I didn’t mind. Then he pulled up my pajamas, turned me over, asked my mother to put more cold water on the washcloth, and went back to stroking my cheek.

  I heard Uncle Hugh talking to my mother across the room. I heard the words “very serious” and “we’ll know by morning.” But I was not in the least worried. I was in dreamland with a kind and protective Uncle Unger watching over me.

  20.

  On certain Sundays, after I got back from church, and after Mom and Uncle Unger got up and dressed, we’d all go to the apartment of Trippy’s grandparents. They were the parents of J. J., Trippy’s dad. Gramps and Gramps’s wife, Mary Francis, lived in the upper half of a yellow two-family house across town. Like Trippy’s family, they didn’t have much money, but they had enough money and even more tradition to have relatives over for TV and meals. I liked going, mainly because the food was so good.

  I never understood exactly how Unger was related to them, but he was close enough that we had many delicious Sunday dinners there: roast beef, ham, sweet potatoes with marshmallow, biscuits with butter and honey, grits or mashed potatoes and sometimes both, fried chicken, green beans with bacon, stewed okra and tomatoes, black-eyed peas, pecan or apple pie à la mode. I loved everything, except I hated sweet potatoes, even with marshmallow. Unger would force me to eat them anyway, which I thought unfair because when we had carrots, he didn’t have to eat them, simply because he didn’t like them. “When you get to be my age, then you can decide,” he’d say.

  Sometimes Oral Roberts would be on the TV in a small sitting room off the living room. An ancient lady in a wheelchair would always be there watching that TV, sitting just about three feet away from it. They called her Aunt Bessie, but she didn’t eat with us, no one ever talked to her, and she didn’t speak to anyone.