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   MY UNCLE BILL REALLY ISN’T HERE

          It is stark here, lonely too. The nearly identical gray-granite grave stones in impersonal rows on neatly cut grass make it feel cold even though it is a warm day and the sun is out. A lone gnarled cedar grows off to the side. A work-truck rumbles beyond distant graves. My uncle “William Fox, 1899-1956,” is buried right here. It’s hard to believe that at 58, I am now older than he was when he died but I can still feel his bone crushing hugs, his prickly mustache on my cheek when he kissed me, the fragrance of pipe tobacco on his jacket.

                One of the many great days I spent with him was a sunny day like this back when I was eleven or twelve. He traveled around to different garages selling Moog auto parts, shock absorbers, I think, but that afternoon, his big black Buick needed an oil change so we pulled into a garage owned by one of his customers. We stood at the entrance—a grimy place with patches of dirty grease on the floor, a Great Bear auto parts sign and a calendar featuring a woman with her breasts exposed. I had the feeling that I shouldn’t be looking at her, but I did anyway when I thought that no one was looking. She was wearing a bathing suit bottom but her breasts were full and round and she leaned forward slightly so they just hung slightly away from her body. They looked firm and soft and I couldn’t stop looking at them. My uncle saw me looking at her and patted me on the shoulder, “That’s some good looking woman; it’s okay, I like looking at her too.” I knew then that I loved him.

        A year later I was rummaging around in my father’s desk looking for a pencil when I found a post card with the picture like the one on the calendar. When my father saw me, he came over and said angrily, “Put that back—that isn’t for little boys.”

        I was twenty-two when my uncle died and I remember standing in the crowded funeral home with his body in the open casket at the other side of the room. It was the first time I’d been to a funeral let alone being in the same room with an open casket with a body in it. Even when my grandparents died, my parents wouldn’t let me go to the funeral, “It’s not for youngsters. We don’t want to expose you to all that…” which I took to mean that it was pretty awful. My mother later told me that my father saw so much death and so many dead bodies during WW II that he didn’t want me attending any funerals. From where I was standing I could see that the underside of the casket’s top was lined with a white satiny material and I could see the vague outlines of his face and body. I felt uneasy to say the least.

        The room was full of people and there was a low buzz of conversation. I didn’t know most of the visitors but I could catch bits of pieces of an argument over whether Snyder or Mantle was the better hitter. Half-dozen burly men dressed in dark suits stood together but one by one they left their small circle and went up to the casket then returned and reported back to the others. I wondered if the guy with the thick glasses was Nickos, the local bookie. My uncle loved to bet on the ponies and for all I knew they were hovering around, making sure he was dead and trying to figure out how they could get my aunt to cover his debts. I had news for them. He didn’t have any money. But then again maybe he had a stash in some Swiss bank. He was like that. You’d never know with him.

        The man with the pock-marked face standing off to the side, might have been one of his old Navy buddies. Uncle Bill told me about how he once had shore leave with his shipmates in Honolulu and spent the entire time trying to seduce a pretty girl who came to a USO dance. He never said if he succeeded.  And that bright-red haired woman wearing a tight black dress must have been Mildred from his office. He told me she was always trying to get him to come up to her apartment for a drink. I remember him turning to me, “I’m a happily married man, what do I need that for?” And then he winked, “But don’t think I wasn’t tempted—she had some cute ass.” She went up to the casket, reached in—probably to touch his body--and whispered something as if he really could hear her.

        Uncle Bill’s son, Steve, a big shouldered guy with blond hair and a great tan, stood near my aunt. He was a total screw-up. Never graduated high school where he majored in “Thunderbird” and then graduated to “Four Roses.” My uncle tried to straighten him out but a person has to want to get straightened out. My mother thought that I was the son he wanted, but she got it wrong, my uncle grieved about Steve or ”Stevie” as he called him as if he were still a little kid. Sometimes we were talking and something, anything, like a mention of school would remind him of Steve and I could see how he’d look off, his brown eyes would water slightly, he’d shake his head sadly and then compose his face. It was almost as if he was re-molding his face into a smile. In the end Steve went into rehab, got sober, worked on a charter fishing boat for a few years, then bought his own boat and made a good living taking rich New Yorkers out deep sea fishing off Florida . Uncle Bill would show off pictures of the boat. It was beautiful with a mahogany cabin but my Uncle acted like he was the captain of the Queen Mary, he was so proud. Then Steve lost the boat. There were some rumors that the bank repossessed it. My father thought the boat really belonged to the mob that used charter fishing as a cover for smuggling. He said that Steve was lucky to get out of it alive. After that, Uncle Bill never spoke of Steve and I never wanted to cause him any pain by asking about him.

        So, my uncle’s body was across the room and I felt that if I didn’t go over and see him I would be offending him in some way, like I was ignoring him, ignoring his presence in the room. And would he be pissed off! There was the time he found out that I had a date over in his neighborhood and didn’t stop in to say hello. Would you believe that he called me up and demanded an explanation: “So now you are ignoring your uncle.” “What do you mean?” “You were a block away last night and didn’t even stop in.” “I had a date.” “Would it hurt to come a little early and say hello or even better yet introduce the young lady to me.” And he was serious. Really. It took me twenty minutes of dancing around to explain why I couldn’t stop over, even for a minute. After I got off the phone I paced up and down in my bedroom wanting to go over to my uncle’s house right then just to get a hug, just to feel that he still loved me, just to know that we were still friends, but I was due at my good friend Paul’s house to prepare for Monday’s chemistry test and I really needed the help.

        Whenever he saw me, no matter how old I was, my uncle would give me a bone-crushing hug and a kiss. I can still smell the “Old Spice,” aftershave he used. I can still picture him sitting on my parents’ back porch with my other aunts and uncles on many Sunday evenings in summer. The cicadas throbbed; my father tended the hamburgers on the barbeque, someone on the next street set off a few firecrackers. Uncle Bill would take out his pipe and soft leather tobacco pouch, form a kind of funnel around the bowl of his pipe with his left hand and fill it with his special Dunhill tobacco. Then he’d strike a wooden match on the sole of his shoe, light his pipe and blow out tobacco-fragrant smoke rings. He drank Johnny Walker Red and water while the others were drinking Chablis and insisted that I taste a little of his so I’d develop a taste for a “man’s drink” when I got older. When my mother shot him a “look,” he retorted, “He’s my nephew—I just want him to appreciate the finer things in life.”  While my parents and my other aunts and uncles were lamenting Stevenson’s loss to Eisenhower, he would always want to hear all about what I was doing in school, reminding me, “Make sure you do well in math and science. Engineering is the future and you’ve got the head for it. I had a good head at your age too, but I didn’t apply myself. Don’t you make the same mistake.” Then he leaned over and tapped me lightly on my forehead to emphasize the point. He’d ask how I was doing playing second base and then he’d wink and raise his bushy eye brows and ask which girl was I interested in at the time.

        I was amazed at how different he was from my mother who was his sister. When I was in the fourth grade, my mother, who added up the groceries in her head before the clerk could do it on the cash register, sat with me at our kitchen table with the white and blue painted chairs and the blue oil cloth cover, to help me with long division. She sat close to me; I could feel her fleshy arm next to my shoulder and she smelled good—she always did. As I worked on the homework, she bit her lip in frustration watching me struggle and finally after many false starts, mistakes and erasures I finished and she got up, turned to me and said, “When you grow up, try to do something that doesn’t involve numbers—you’ll both be happier.” Fortunately in high school, something clicked and I later became an engineer just like my uncle said. In fact when I was accepted to engineering school my father proudly bought me a new K&E slide rule in a fancy leather case with my initials in gold—those were the days before calculators. I still have it in my desk.

        Back to my uncle. You know, for all his talk about other women, he was only interested in one woman, my Aunt Ida. My uncle really loved her—always said she was as beautiful as Grace Kelly. My aunt was usually glamorous and stylish and wore her long blond hair in a neat French twist like Grace Kelly’s. But God bless my uncle, Aunt Ida with her too long nose and wide mouth was no Grace Kelly, but that’s how he saw her. At the funeral home her hair was wild and her black dress was rumpled. Steve had his arm around her and helped her over to the casket. She stood there holding onto it, shaking her head, whispering something I couldn’t hear, then she slipped a small white box with a green ribbon around it into the casket, turned away, her face in her hands. People in the room moved back, creating an aisle as Steve escorted her back to her seat.

        It was so sad—I remember when my uncle was as strong as an ox--his forearms were as big as my biceps. My father who was more the wiry type and ran track in college called him a bulvan, which he said with a less than complementary tone. My father had it all wrong—my uncle was a shtarker but he was no bulvan. When I was in high school and we had to run a half mile for gym my father kept asking my time. After I told him, he suggested I take up bowling, “Less running,” he snickered shaking his head. But there was the time—I must have been sixteen then—when my uncle  brought over an old “Vic Seixas” tennis racket without strings he’d found in his basement. He handed it to me with a big smile, pleased as hell with himself that he was giving me God-knows-what. It was all scuffed up and still smelled musty. I told him, “I don’t play tennis.” He said, ‘You’ll learn; you have a talent for the game; I can tell those things.” Damn if he wasn’t right. Then he winked, “Besides, it comes with free lessons and I’ll even get it strung for you.” I must have looked puzzled because he pointed to himself, “Yours truly was pretty good when I was young.” I remember waiting for him at my high school tennis court and saw him get out of his car, tall with his a neat mustache. But I was mortified when I watched him walk up the path wearing black top sneakers, bright green shorts and a pink shirt instead of tennis whites which were standard back then. I actually tried to hide behind the judge’s chair, but he saw me and waved so what could I do? Fortunately, it was a Sunday and only people in the neighborhood used the courts, but still in all, in between him showing me how to swing and serve, I looked around to make sure no one who knew me would notice. I only hope my uncle never had an inkling how I felt because if he did, he never let on. Even then, I felt so guilty that I insisted on buying him an ice cream soda when we were done, even though he usually paid for the treats; and, when we were sitting at the marble counter of the luncheonette, our rackets propped up against the side of our seats, Paul came in and I made a big show of introducing him to my uncle. When I got good enough to actually play, my uncle who must have been in his late 40s then, moved around like he was on roller skates and had the stamina of a marathon runner. He ran me so hard that my legs felt like lead and I could hardly catch my breath, but later on I made my high school team, thanks to him. He was like that—full of energy. Besides, he knew what you needed before you did.

        So finally I took a deep breath and zigzagged back and forth across the room between the men in the dark suits, the gray haired woman in the black dress, a fat guy with his thumbs in his suspenders, toward the casket. My hands were sweating. I inched up so I was standing about six feet away, then moved closer and glanced at my uncle. I could see vague outlines of his body. The bottom half of the casket was closed. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and a bold red and yellow tie. I smiled to myself—he always wore loud ties. His face, well, it was my uncle, but his full face was drawn, his fleshy nose was now sharp, and his skin, ruddy in life, looked gray-beige. Where was my joke telling, full-of-life uncle? He was missing and I had no desire to whisper anything to him because his body was there but he really wasn’t. I backed away from the casket, found a chair in an empty corner and sat down. I knew my uncle, my real uncle wasn’t there, and I wondered, where is he? He isn’t just gone, finished, kaput, done with, over and out. He didn’t just disappear, vanish. I closed my eyes and pictured his smiling face hovering over the room. Then it slowly receded and I whispered good-by.  

        No one else in the family is buried here: his grave is all by itself. My Aunt Ida remarried three years after he died—she must be buried with her second husband. And, I suppose my uncle isn’t really here either. I think back to that day thirty-six years ago when I looked at him in the casket and I don’t know if I understood it fully at the time, but when I saw his body I realized that, yes of course it was his body, but my uncle really wasn’t there in the casket. That was the first inkling I had that his jokes, his wink, his hand on my shoulder, his hugs, his smell of Old Spice and pipe tobacco, his eyes and how they softened when he raised his eyebrows in the middle as he listened with such care when I, as a sixteen year old, told him how my first real girl friend dumped me, in a word: his marvelous personality, his soul simply didn’t perish.