Mom was the most sentimental one, obsessed with the very idea of family, so she was the one who kept in touch with Uncle Alan. And often got teary-eyed when his name was mentioned.
Uncle Alan had moved to Seattle before I was born. Everyone else lived within 20 miles of each other on Long Island, baby-sat each others’ kids, had mass family barbecues in each others’ backyards. Uncle Alan was a stranger, an old photograph, a rare story. His name was linked with disappointment. Sometimes during those barbecues, while I sat inside reading while my Uncle Abe–the blustery one, already turning fat–endlessly tossed a baseball to his two sons, I’d hear someone say, "He’s just like his Uncle Alan." It wasn’t a compliment.
Uncle Abe never mentioned him, sometimes left the room if he were being discussed. Uncle Bill, more mild and nostalgic by nature, told me how his brother Alan, although younger by two years, had helped him study for his English exams. "Couldn’t have passed without him." Aunt Helen seemed to remember Alan as a small child, always delighting everyone with his manners and his helpfulness. It’s as if he ceased to exist when he moved away.
Once a year Uncle Alan would come to New York to see the sights, visit old acquaintances, attend concerts and shows. On a Sunday morning some unknown friend would drop him off at our house–always at our house, because of Mom–where the whole family had assembled for brunch. Even Uncle Abe came, although he and Alan would exchange little more than hellos. Uncle Alan had hair like his brothers’, thin and dishwater brown, quickly receding. But he was lanky where they were fat, and walked with an easy, fluid lope. He had sad droopy eyes, like a beagle, and a thin dark moustache. In the crowd of my aunts and uncles and cousins, grabbing for bagels and lox and little turkey sandwiches with mustard, he seemed to get lost, swallowed up. Maybe that was the intended effect, to have him there but reduce his presence.
After the meal his nieces and nephews would crowd around. Uncle Alan, who had furthered his education after leaving our world, was an English teacher at a girls’ school outside Seattle. He was great with us, attentive, funny, never patronizing or dismissive. When my sister and my cousin Sharon put on their shows, little entertainments of song and dance and skits that they would rehearse for days before he arrived, he would pay a quarter to get in, watch solemnly, make professional-sounding suggestions. One year I rehearsed with them, but after my first dance number my dad yanked me out, saying, gently enough, "That’s girl stuff."
Alan also knew more about cars than anybody, putting the other men to shame. He said he knew somebody who collected them. To the other boys and me that sounded wonderful, like something out of a fantasy, but Uncle Abe would curl his lip and the other adults look down at their shoes. Alan would tell us about his favorites, a ’59 Cadillac, a ’64 Chevy, sometimes making quick sketches of them on the backs of paper napkins.
Then his friend would come to pick him up, and never come in, not even for coffee. After he left, the house would settle down into glumness. My mother and Aunt Helen would wash the dishes, an old team; their sisters-in-law would drink coffee and gossip at the kitchen table. My uncles and father would sit down to play cards and argue at the tops of their lungs, and my cousin Sam and I would flip coins to see who would get which of Alan’s car napkins. After a while people would start to drift out, back to their own homes. I would press my napkins between the pages of a special notebook, and another year would be gone.
When I was 15, and my sister was away at college, we got a call one day from a stranger in Seattle. My mother started to scream and fell into a chair, dropping the phone. My father talked to her, quietly, slowly, stroking her hair, then putting his arms around her. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and was too frozen to ask, or move. Dad asked me to go to my room. In a little while he came upstairs. "You’re mother’s asleep," he said. Then he paused, looking around the room like it was new to him. The Spider-Man poster, the green lamp on my desk, my bed. "Your Uncle Alan got into a fight with some guys in a parking lot. They beat him up pretty bad. He didn’t make it."
"He didn’t make what?" I said blankly. Then I worked it out. "You mean he died? A parking lot?" My father waited for me to react, to yell or cry or throw myself on the bed. But I just said, "You mean he died?"
My parents went to Seattle for the funeral, with Uncle Bill and Aunt Ruth. It was my mom’s first trip to that city. My Uncle Abe decided to sit it out. That’s what he said, sit it out. And Aunt Helen’s back was acting up and she couldn’t handle the long flight. The day before my parents came back I went to Aunt Helen’s for dinner. Tears dripped down her face while her thick husband and their wolfish children ordered her around, demanding more salt, more Dr. Pepper, more meat. I stared at my plate and ate my pot roast in silence, bite after bite after bite.
A few days later Uncle Abe came over to talk to my mother. I sat slumped in the den watching Time Tunnel, but kept turning to look at them at the kitchen table, where she was filling him in on the details. Every now and then he would pound the table, so hard I could feel it, and once he broke a glass. "God damn it!" he shouted, "But what the hell else can you expect!" And he looked at me.
