AUGUST 11, 2023 – (Cont.) It was one night over beers at the Bierstube just down from our ski lodge, however, when Cliff and I started talking in earnest about the dilapidated state of the real estate in which he had chosen to set down his business roots.
“Eric, does your family know much about how Uncle Bruce runs the property there in Rutherford?” Cliff asked.
“Not really. As part of my grandparents’ estate planning, the commercial property was gifted out in small increments to my sisters and me and our kids, so technically, legally, we all are owners, but Uncle Bruce runs the place, of course. Has run it ever since Grandpa was incapacitated near the end of his years.”
“Yeah, I remember your grandfather. He was getting pretty old by the time I arrived, but I’d see him every day walking slowly around the building to inspect things, and then he’d stop out in front of Fun Ghoul, and I’d go out and talk to him for a while. I know he was an important guy in his day. I mean, everyone in town had heard of him. He had a reputation as the Godfather of Rutherford.
“You’re right, Cliff. In his day, Grandpa was a mover and a shaker—definitely a mover—you might say.’”
Cliff took a big quaff from his beer mug. “Eric, I hope you don’t mind my talking about your family’s money, but you do know there’s a lot of money there, right?”
“Well, I’m not sure what you mean by ‘a lot of money.’”
Cliff leaned back against his chair. “Eric, Uncle Bruce is sitting on millions, did you know that? I mean, he’s so much as told me that.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked, leaning forward.
Cliff looked around the noisy Bierstube, but no one could have heard us if they’d wanted to. “He’s got at least 10 million, Eric. At least. Plus all that real estate—in Rutherford and in Connecticut.”
“I don’t think so, Cliff.” I recalled to myself the exercises that I had undertaken during my work stints in Rutherford back in 1975 and 1980 and how I had dug into things then to get a handle on just what was there, and to what extent it was being managed or mismanaged. I had not identified in aggregate, anything close to 10 million, though all the “paprwrk” I confronted made the place look like a paper recycling center inside a wind tunnel.
Cliff looked at me in disbelief. “Eric, when your grandmother was alive, she told me that she had lots of money, and . . .”
“Lots of real estate, maybe,” I interrupted, “but not 10 million dollars worth, and certainly not liquid assets even approaching that. Believe me, Cliff, I know that’s not the case.”
Cliff grunted. “You’re wrong, Eric. Your grandmother had tons of dough. Your uncle has tons of dough. That’s what makes the whole picture so whacked.”
“What do you mean?” I said, intrigued now, by Cliff’s adamant focus on the subject of the Holman’s money.
“Look, I know he’s got millions, Eric. I swear it’s over 10 million—a lot more, if you throw all that property into it—but okay, let’s say it’s only half that. Still, Uncle Bruce lives on a goddamn shoestring. He buys his clothes at K-Mart, he eats out of tin cans, he drives an old car with a cracked windshield and a bad muffler, he never replaces anything, he just comes up with some whacko system for fixing stuff. He pulls out salvage materials from other people’s garbage—I’ve seen him, Eric. The other tenants will put their garbage cans out on the sidewalk for collection, and then I’ll see him go through it and pull shit out that is pure garbage. I keep tellin‘ him, ‘Bruce, go crazy. Go out and buy a couple of nice suits. Buy yourself a new convertible. Take a trip to Europe, treat yourself to some nice things. Buy a new hairpiece that actually fits and looks good on ya. What the hell, spend some of your money. What are you afraid of? It’s not going to kill ya.” Cliff laughed.
“I know, I know,” I said. “He wasn’t always so frugal. I mean, he drove nice cars, he dressed well, he did take trips to Europe, he skied all the time, he was generous toward us. I just don’t know what changed.”
Neither one of us had made much progress with the pitcher of beer on the table. I took a sip from my own mug, which prompted Cliff to do the same. Just then I thought of an extreme case of Uncle Bruce’s frugality.
“I remember a story that my sister Nina told me,” I said. “She was visiting Rutherford a while ago, and she and Uncle Bruce were talking in the kitchen. Uncle Bruce took a few sidesteps and reached for the cookie bag in a bin on a pantry shelf. As long as I can remember, there was always a stash of cookies there. Grandpa would always grab a couple whenever he passed through the pantry into the dining room.
“Anyway, while he was talking to Nina, Uncle Bruce pulled out a bag of cookies, and in the course of drawing a handful of cookies out of the bag, he dropped some onto the floor. But mind you, the kitty litter box was stored right there, and as you can imagine, Uncle Bruce isn’t real diligent about cleaning up stuff like kitty litter. The cats had tossed a fair amount of the kitty litter out of the box. About a half dozen of the little cookies landed in the immediate vicinity of the box. Being ultra frugal, he picked up the fallen goodies, one by one, and put them back into the bag. Nina was shocked. ‘You’re not putting those back in the bag, are you?’ she said. Whereupon, you know what Uncle Bruce does?”
“No,” said Cliff. He was smiling, chuckling. I knew he could relate to the story.
“He reached into the bag, randomly pulled out a couple of cookies and said, ‘Okay, we won’t put all of them back.’”
Cliff nearly choked on the beer in his mouth. He managed to get the mug back up to his lips in time to avoid spitting on the table. “That’s classic,” he said. “Totally gross, totally Uncle Bruce. The kind of thing I see every day, Eric. You guys, your mom, your sisters, you—you swoop in once, two, three times a year, but I see that kind of stuff every day.
“But you know what, Eric? We can laugh about your uncle and everything, but I gotta tell you, I really feel sorry for him. I think since your grandmother died, he’s really lonely. He’s got his cats—especially the one he calls, ‘Mommy’ . . . ” Cliff’s attempt to get semi-serious was threatened by his mere mention of the cat’s name, “. . . I know that’s totally weird to call his favorite cat ‘Mommy,’ like it reminds him of Gaga, maybe . . . But as I was saying, I just think he’s terribly lonely, and not that money is what brings happiness, but damnit, Eric, his life could be so much better if he’d just cut loose with some of the money and spend it on himself.
“I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve taken him on business trips myself[1], just to get him out of the house, out of Rutherford. The only way I can do it is to pay for everything myself. I really don’t mind it, but he could be doin’ that all the time on his own. I know he loves to travel. Why doesn’t he just buy himself a ticket to London, stay at some five-star hotel there, see the sights, and enjoy life?”
* * *
Later that night, after everyone had crawled into bed, I lay awake, staring into the darkness. I contemplated Cliff’s certitude about the “millions” that Uncle Bruce was supposedly sitting on, but I knew better than to believe it. On the other hand, I thought . . . it was plausible.
For one thing, ever since I had been introduced to the “Holman filing system” during my work stint in Rutherford the summer of 1975, I was shocked by how records of all kinds were haphazardly maintained. Who really knew what the family owned? If it was in the form of something for which you received a periodic account statement, good luck taking inventory. Couple that, my thoughts continued, with the fact that Uncle Bruce was a very active securities investor and trader. He was always talking about how close he was to his stock broker, and how they would analyze this company and that one. On the train ride out to Montana, for crying out loud, over one of our long, four-course dinners in the dining car, Uncle Bruce had waxed long if not eloquently about his laddered bond portfolio formula, the increasing PE ratios of a number of stocks he had recently purchased, and best of all, how he liked to attend annual meetings of public companies in which he had invested and then, after the formal Q and A, he would button-hole the CEO and ask him some “hard-hitting” questions about the direction of the company, often, according to Uncle Bruce, stumping the executive.
And nagging me most was the legend of the New England Calendar. As I recalled Mother’s version of it, when she was in college and Christmas was approaching, she wondered what gift to send to her grandmother, Ethelyn Huntley Holman, who was wintering near Clearwater, Florida. It was a difficult task, as Mother related it, “Since Grandma had everything she could possibly want.” Pressed for time, she decided to get her a high-grade calendar featuring photographs of vintage New England scenes.
Down in Florida, meanwhile, Grandma Holman wondered what she could get her granddaughter for Christmas. Again, as Mother related the story, “She [meaning Mother] already had everything she could possibly want.” By pure coincidence—or maybe not, given the strength of the genes—the grandmother bought the granddaughter the very same kind of high-grade New England calendar that the granddaughter had bought for the grandmother.
When Mother’s gift arrived in the mail down in Florida, so the story went, the “ne’er do well” members of the family (according to Uncle Bruce)—Uncle Bruce and Mother’s Uncle Henry and cousin Bud—happened to be visiting Grandma Holman. They were on hand when she opened the present and said, with great puzzlement, “What’s this? A New England calendar? That’s what I got Sis for Christmas.”
It didn’t take but a moment, so went the legend, for Bud to take full advantage of the situation. Before his wealthy grandmother could figure out that the exchange of calendars had been a grand coincidence, he said, “Don’t you see? Sis didn’t like the gift you got her, so she returned it.” Having been very close to her only granddaughter, the matriarch of the family was greatly hurt and offended. Sure enough, a short time later, she changed her will. Mother would get nothing, and Uncle Bruce and Bud would split the difference in addition to what the will had already provided them. It was said that Mother’s Grandma Holman was a very wealthy woman, and thus, if a large chunk of her estate wound up going to Uncle Bruce, and none of it to Mother, it would support Cliff’s conclusion that Uncle Bruce was worth a lot of money.[2]
Whatever the truth was regarding Uncle Bruce’s wealth, I thought about what Cliff had said about Uncle Bruce’s loneliness and how it must be to live in that big, old house all by himself after over half a century with Gaga and Grandpa. How it was that Uncle Bruce had become so frugal, irrespective of how much money he had? I knew that whatever he had, it was far more than he needed, far more than an amount that would reasonably require someone to be so frugal. Mother and Dad were frugal too, but not that frugal, and I guessed that as comfortable as they were, they surely had far less means than Uncle Bruce. Sleep overcame me before I could achieve any resolution to my thoughts.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] A decade later, Cliff would show me an eight-by-ten color photograph of himself and Uncle Bruce from one of those very business trips that the two had taken together. It was a costume convention of some sort, and apparently there had been a full NASCAR get-up, complete with a mock racecar all decked out with racing numbers and a dozen or more endorsement stickers. Smiling in front of the racecar as if they were 10-year olds at a birthday party with a ‘race car theme,’ Cliff and Uncle Bruce stood in full racing uniforms plastered with colorful “sponsor” names, their arms cradling authentic racing helmets. Cliff looked like the real thing, and knowing that he owned a motorcycle and liked fast, exotic cars, I could easily picture him as a NASCAR driver. Uncle Bruce was another story—except, thanks to Cliff, he looked as though he was having the time of his life.
[2] Years later, I would ask Mother to confirm the legend. When she retold the tale, it actually turned out to be two stories, which misperceptions had transformed into a somewhat slanderous, urban myth. The basic story—the coincidence of a grandmother and her granddaughter choosing exactly the same Christmas gift for each other was true. However, the cause and effect relationship between the gift exchange and Mother’s forfeiture under the will was, I think, more fiction than fact. The Christmas in question came after Bob Holman, Bud’s brother, had died in the War. About the same time, apparently, my Great Uncle Henry (Grandpa’s sole sibling) had approached his mother about a codicil to her will to accommodate the altered reality that Bud was now Henry’s sole living child, whereas Henry’s brother, Griswold (Grandpa), had two living children—Mother and Uncle Bruce. Henry presented the reasonable argument that his mother’s property should be divided equally between Henry’s side and Griswold’s side. In the case of Ethelyn Huntley Holman’s surviving grandchildren, this meant dividing things between Bud and Uncle Bruce. Obviously, a more equitable division would have been a percentage to Mother and Uncle Bruce divided equally between the two siblings, equal to the percentage that went to Bud, now that Bob was dead. Who knows why Mother didn’t receive an equal share with Uncle Bruce. Given Mother’s explanation of the “New England Calendar Legend,” I doubt that Bud was guilty of any wrong-doing, at least as it had been attributed to him by the Legend. This doubt is based on another truth for which I have documentary (a lawsuit!) and eye-witness (my own) evidence: UB despised Bud quite apart from the Legend. Mother always enjoyed good relations with Bud. UB never did.
