AUGUST 25, 2023 – When I arrived in Rutherford the next morning, no one was around. However, UB’s Headquarters were wide open, so I entered, poked around to find what I could among all the water-logged papers and piles of junk. I began copying an appraisal and soon decided simply to stuff the thick, spiral-bound document into my briefcase. UB would never notice.
I also took advantage of UB’s absence and called the “appraiser.” I quizzed him about his previous appraisal, which had assigned a very low value to the commercial property (for tax appeal purposes). His “updated” appraisal, for estate purposes—and doubtless for his own purposes, if he put in an offer to buy it, as I suspected he wanted to do, was twice as much, but still very low. My objective was to effectuate additional transfers of UB’s interests in Holman Holding, LLC to the next two generations. This would then complete the gifting program that had been initiated years before as part of the estate planning for Gaga and Grandpa. Once complete, we could take control of the commercial property. I knew it sounded crazy. After gaining legal control of the LLC, we’d have to physically pull UB away from the property, but it was the only way to achieve justice. Same with Hamburg, though getting UB to part with a majority interest in that property would be darned near impossible.
When I finished with the appraiser, UB was still gone. Yesterday’s anger returned, however, as I dwelt on the whole situation. I also felt a strong dose of depression coming on. I needed to talk to someone who could grasp the depth and breadth of all the issues with which I had to grapple, yet I also knew I couldn’t talk to anyone (besides Cliff), about all that I knew. I hesitated and vacillated and eventually, in despair I set out for the church—Grace Episcopal Church—where I had been baptized, to seek out one Canon Partridge, the rector who had ministered to Gaga in her final days, despite her avowed atheism, and whom Mother had gotten to know quite well in the course of her many visits to Rutherford over the years. However unsettled my own faith was right then and would continue to be, Mother’s religious influence, whatever its basis, was as strong as ever.
I didn’t get far. Between Highland Cross and Passaic Avenue, down by the post office, as I strode along, Cliff pulled up in his van. I hopped in, and for the next hour or so, we drove around and talked in earnest about the whole UB situation. I was seething, and my anger, my outrage, began to consume me again. Only Cliff could fully comprehend my frame of mind. He had long-endured what I had experienced over the past week.
I asked him flat out, why he didn’t just pick up and leave the premises he rented from UB. The answer was that his business was too closely tied to his location. I figured there was probably something more, some deep-seated psychological reason for staying: Cliff couldn’t abandon UB any more easily than I could abandon Cliff.
In the end, as empathetic as Cliff was, he urged against precipitous action, and he was doubtless right. I needed to swallow my anger and move on.
We returned to Holman Corner, and in the driveway, UB was conferring with a sinewy man clad in work pants and a T-shirt, standing next to the back end of an incredibly ugly, ancient, over-sized station wagon with handicap plates and its tailgate open, revealing a jumble of tools and supplies inside.
“What do you know. It’s Angelo,” Cliff said, as he parked his van over to the side. I had heard about Angelo, but I had never met him.
Cliff made the introduction. “This is Bruce’s nephew, Eric,” he said.
“Eric, yes, of course, the nephew, yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Angelo, nervously. “Bruce has told me all about you, yeah.”
Angelo was UB’s handyman, roughly 60 and semi-retired. According to UB they had met about four or five years before at a coffee shop in nearby Lyndhurst. Although Angelo was in remarkably good shape, his wife was not. I had also been told that they had an adult child who lived with them and needed constant care. In Angelo’s case, the “handy” in “handyman” meant that he was familiar with a variety of tools and how they worked. He did all kinds of odd jobs for UB, from gardening chores to cleaning out debris from burned out houses to cutting and installing plywood over window openings of burned out houses. The plywood mission, I would soon learn, was Angelo’s job of the day.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m here to help with the house, gees, what a mess, yeah, your uncle needs the help, doesn’t he, yeah, what a mess.” Angelo seemed to be over-caffeinated, but maybe it was just his nature to be nervous like a rabbit. He reached into the back end of the station wagon and pulled out a tape measure, a power drill, a nail apron, and a circular saw. I offered to grab the saw before he dropped it, and with UB in tow, we marched the tools into the house and up to the second floor, where Angelo had set up a temporary work area.
For the next hour or so, while UB was preoccupied in his Headquarters, I helped Angelo measure, cut and fit additional plywood on a couple of window openings. He worked in constant fear of UB.
“No, no, no, no,” he’d say. “We can’t do that! We can’t do that! Your uncle won’t want it that way, no siree. Your uncle will have a fit. No, we can’t do it that way. I know he has his way of doing things, that’s for sure, yeah, but if we don’t do it his way, he’ll get mad, don’t you think? Can’t have that! No siree. Can’t have that. Got to be done his way.” But after a time, I convinced Angelo that “the world according to Bruce” didn’t apply to measuring and cutting pieces of plywood. I think he had enough sense to be relieved, and soon he met my suggestions with a plain “Yeah, yeah, yeah” in his heavy New Jersey accent.
As we got into our work, I learned that Angelo wasn’t quite sure what to make of UB, but the money was good, and Angelo wasn’t the sort to question a good thing any more than is good for a man. Once he got comfortable with me, he expressed his mild dismay that UB intended to reinstall all the old bathroom fixtures that he—UB—had salvaged from the dumpsters. “He doesn’t like to spend money, that’s for sure, that’s for sure,” said Angelo.
“You’re right about that, Angelo,” I said, lifting another sheet of plywood onto the sawhorses.
“He doesn’t want to spend any money on the house. I keep tellin’ him, he’s gonna have to spend money on the house, but he doesn’t want to spend money on the house, so I don’t know what he’s going to do. No, he doesn’t want to spend money on the house, no he doesn’t.” Angelo seemed to be getting so worked up about it, I had to change the subject.
UB appeared just as Angelo and I were tightening the screws on the last piece of plywood. “It’s in,” Angelo announced. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s in, Bruce. It’s tight so nothin’ will get in. Yeah, it’s in.”
“Hmmm, hm,” was UB’s response.
With that, I helped Angelo gather up his tools and carry them back to his station wagon. UB then slipped Angelo a couple of crisp C-notes, for which Angelo thanked him profusely. The handyman then closed the tailgate to the station wagon, bade us farewell, and maneuvered the old vehicle out of the driveway.
UB then directed me to his next project—putting more tarps in place over the top of the house and hauling up more buckets to catch the rainwater. From the start, it simply wasn’t a viable effort. Without some kind of supportive framework, the tarps could not be fitted in a meaningful way. First he had us tying them together. Then he had us positioning them so that water would be funneled into plastic, five-gallon buckets. Finally, he got the idea of draping tarps over the charred stubs of some of the longer rafters that poked into the sky, except we couldn’t reach them, so UB announced that he’d go back to the warehouse and get an industrial-size, aluminum step-ladder and some extra buckets. I followed him down and fetched the buckets, which he’d left at the back steps, while he continued into the big garage to retrieve the ladder.
It was while I was trudging back up the stairs that I experienced a revelation: the house, my inheritance, Gaga and Grandpa’s legacy and that of my great grandparents, had all been destroyed and squandered not by a fire but by a mental disease. A genetic mental disease, and no matter how much I wanted to wish them away, the consequences were all around me—in the stained woodwork, in the charred timbers, in the sheets of plywood tightly screwed into the mahogany window frames by Angelo the handyman; in “the world according to Bruce.”
I stopped mid-flight to contemplate all of this, but a moment later I heard the clatter of the aluminum step-ladder that UB was dragging into the house. Time to complete the task that UB had started and time to do things his way.
When we finished, he folded up the eight-foot-tall ladder and dragged it down the stairway, bumpity-bump-bump, creating enough noise to disturb the quiet of our dead ancestors who’d built the once-gorgeous house. I lingered behind and walked to the side facing the warehouses. I poked my head through a gap between the jerry-rigged tarps, as if I were inspecting the scene outside a big tent. I stood there and surveyed the old, Dickensian buildings that housed 125 years of family history. Down below, UB pulled the aluminum ladder across the driveway like a garden rake across a chalkboard, and as the sound split the autumn air, I wondered what was to become of all this property and its inheritors.
Just then, I peered down at the floor and noticed a number of charred slates scattered at unnatural angles. I picked one up and eyed it closely. Mild amusement rose in my chest. I thought of mounting it somehow on a board, building a frame out of restored mahogany from the house and taking a piece of brass from a pane of the library pocket doors, shining it up, inscribing it with the words, My Inheritance, affixing it to the bottom of the mahogany frame, and hanging the damn thing in our house back in Minnesota.
I took the slate, I took my inheritance back downstairs, and over to UB’s Headquarters. Without notice by UB, I slipped it into my briefcase. The brass and mahogany would have to wait.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
