AUGUST 17, 2023 – The meeting with Frank and Duane broke up at noon, and UB then drove me to his temporary apartment in East Rutherford. It was a wonderful place, really—brand new, thoroughly attractive abode, with everything tastefully designed. I thought UB should be very pleased with these circumstances while he waited for the house to be restored. I hoped, with no reservations, that this would work perfectly for him, that he wouldn’t trash it—how could he, it being was too nice a place to ruin? But I thought otherwise when I saw a stack of unorganized clothing piled high over one half of the sofa and a large yard waste bag filled to capacity standing in the middle of the cluttered living room, with trash on the floor surrounding the bag; empty soup cans and take-out food containers sitting atop the kitchen counter; dirty dishes in the sink. Upstairs, his bedroom was likewise in disarray, and the bathroom already needed serious cleaning.
When he plunked himself down in a chair in the bedroom, I seized the opportunity to open a friendly chat. Ever since I had made reservations for my trip East, I had contemplated addressing with him all of the really big issues that had crowded the horizon for so long; matters that now threatened to pull UB and perhaps the rest of the family into a deep, dark quagmire over the disposition of all the property that had been handed down over generations but that UB still controlled. I had not envisioned having the conversation on the first day of my visit, but I was certainly prepared for it.
I started with the big picture and worked down to details, just as I had planned. The conversation went perfectly. “What do you need and what do you want out of life?” I asked. I suggested some responses and he expressed his ostensible agreement. “After your financial needs are addressed, “ I said, “It seems to me that your desire is to run Holman Holding [the commercial property] as a hobby.”
“That’s right,” UB said, as he smiled at me.
“And more specifically, you want it to be a hobby that allows you to come and go as you please. If on a Monday morning you wake up and want to go in and dabble with the property, you can. If on Tuesday you’d rather drive to Vermont and not have to worry about the roof leaking, the sidewalks being shoveled, etc., you can just pick up and leave. Isn’t that how you’d like it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then we need to do what is necessary to put things in that kind of place—which they are not today.”
“Yes,” he said with a very deliberate nod.
“Now, let’s look at your place of residence. This apartment is a beautiful place and remarkably affordable. And, if you’re anything like me, you’ll fill the space you have. Now, with a much smaller place than you’re used to, you’ll accumulate far less stuff.” I laughed.
“I know!” he said, joining my laughter.
I can’t wait to tell Cliff, I thought. He won’t believe the progress I’m making. I’d forgotten about what it was he said he had to tell me but couldn’t over the phone. On a roll, I took on the whole matter of estate planning. I raised the matter of divesting portions of his estate to avoid inheritance taxes. I even tackled the issue of Gaga’s estate, the status of administration, and the amount and timing of a distribution to Mother.
“Sixty to seventy thousand,” he said to the question of amount; nothing about timing.
“Why so little?” I asked, stunned by his response. It was a far cry from the “10 million” that Cliff had suggested was the size of Gaga’s estate (three years before during our trip to Montana).
“Because I paid for a lot of things myself in the way of Gaga and Grandpa’s care,” he answered. I wondered, Had he ever paid them any rent for all the years he had lived at 42 Lincoln? Had he ever made a single rent payment or a single mortgage payment ever in his life? I didn’t pursue the matter. To have done so would have jeopardized the positive tenor and substance of this all-important business. However, I could see agitation in his face. I decided it was time to back off. I had broached the “big issues” that someone in the family had to address with UB directly and eventually. I felt as though I had climbed a mighty mountain.
“Well,” UB said with a tone that indicated the session was over. “Why don’t we get some lunch.” He took us to The Diner just opposite the train station on the east side of the tracks that divide Rutherford from East Rutherford. Though a very plain kind of eating establishment, the place was clean, with an extensive, albeit pedestrian, menu and prices from a by-one era. UB’s kind of place. To boot, it was accessible, with lots of adjacent parking. But despite these advantages we and another lone diner were the only patrons.
Afterward, we motored back to 42 Lincoln. UB drove exactly as Grandpa had driven a generation before—poorly and inattentively. At stop signs, he hesitated, and at intersections, he merged almost into cars instead of with them. Once the turn signal was activated, it took my, “Your blinker’s on,” before he de-activated it.
We parked in the driveway and strolled around the corner to check in with Cliff. When UB got distracted in conversation with one of Cliff’s employees, I pulled Cliff aside and told him quietly but excitedly, “Cliff, it’s all going very well. I’ve raised some of the key issues that no one in the family has been able to bring up with him. One aspect is Uncle Bruce moving into the apartment where he’s currently staying”
Cliff gave me a look that contained at once, surprise and skepticism.
The latter reaction was well founded. The Holman side of the family has had remarkably good hearing well into old age[1]. UB had picked up my comment about the apartment and bristling, he stepped over immediately to weigh in on the conversation. “I’m not staying in that apartment, no sir! I’m living in my house.”
“But just try it for awhile, Uncle Bruce,” I said. “Who knows, maybe you’ll like it. Give it a chance, that’s all.”
I could readily sense Cliff’s amusement. “I told you so, he’d later say.
The subject changed, and we talked superficially until Cliff was called away by the phone. UB then suggested a tour of his “headquarters,” as he called them, on the second level of the decrepit warehouse. He led me around the corner to the side entrance to the upstairs office space. In his inimitable style, he climbed the stairs by slamming one foot onto a tread, then the other foot onto the next tread, as if he were lugging a ball and chain behind him.
At the top, we turned down a corridor, then walked down another shorter hallway and passed small, junked-out office spaces along the way. We then came to UB’s central “headquarters”—a suite of three small offices where UB seemed to hole up for most of a typical day. In each of the three was a dilapidated desk. Also, there was a hodgepodge of tables, chairs, armchairs, and folded up wheelchairs[2].
In the first room was a mixed collection of Holman memorabilia—the bronze bust of Grandpa, of all people, an old pair of UB’s skis, a photograph of a United Van Lines eighteen-wheeler. In the middle room was a little jerry-rigged kitchen and dinette equipped with a small refrigerator, toaster, micro-wave oven, and metal shelving stocked with UB specialties—Vienna sausage in a can, pea soup, canned fruit, canned vegetables, and Pepperidge Farm cakes. The room was also UB’s communications center, outfitted with a radio, a telephone and a small television. In the third room of UB’s quarters were stacks upon shelves of papers, folders, notebooks, and boxes of unorganized—well, just plain crap. Throughout the headquarters was the stench of cat litter boxes. A quick survey of UB’s set-up told me that he spent most of his waking hours there and not in the apartment.
In time, I was able to turn to questions concerning the properties—valuations, tax assessments and operating income and expenses. For an hour and a half, I searched through all kinds of papers—in the headquarters proper, as well as in nearby storage rooms. To my surprise, UB was not the least bit put off by my inquisitiveness, and with each layer of papers, I grew bolder in my search.
I found some things of interest, but mostly I found debris, much of it having been carted over from the house after the fire. In one instance, I found a copy of an outdated appraisal of the commercial properties. It had been heavily doused. I opened it and was repulsed by the mildew that had formed between pages. UB took a Wet-Wipe from his stash of randomly acquired and randomly stored household supplies in and around his headquarters and carefully wiped the mildew away, page after page. I wondered whether he intended to do the same with all the other outdated, outmoded documents that he had salvaged from the charred, waterlogged house[3].
More troubling, actually, were all the papers I found that bore Mother’s writing. Never one to see her grapple with the big picture more than UB could, Mother had spent countless hours during each of her many trips to Rutherford, focused on the minutiae of what had become a wholly dysfunctional business. All of her efforts, her page upon page of jottings, note-taking, summaries, correspondence and partially completed forms, dealing with insurance claims, building repairs, or taxes of one form or another, had been, as far as I could tell, incomplete, unsuccessful, or simply a lot of proverbial wheel-spinning. At best, it was all now years obsolete. Each page of handiwork (this being long before the computer age), reflected precious time, enormous quantities of time and effort; a major project of gathering information, account numbers, names, phone numbers, addresses, and so on, all pursuant to a mishmash of directions by UB and well-intentioned initiatives by Mother. But in the end, it was all vastly futile; all for naught—hopeless, useless, irrelevant. And as I reflected on Mother’s bipolar disorder, I wondered, just how much of it was the product of insanity?
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] The one notable exception was George B. Holman, who went deaf and had to retire, probably before his time. According to Mother, her grandfather’s hearing difficulties were the source of his old age crankiness.
[2] Ever since Gaga had been more or less confined to a wheelchair, approximately a quarter century before she died, UB had had a wheelchair fetish, or more precisely, a used wheelchair fetish. In the house, the garages, and the warehouses, the visitor could find any number of vintage wheelchairs. He often sat in one, enjoying the mobility, which a stationary chair couldn’t provide.
[3] After that day, I didn’t think much of the Wet-Wipe action until years later when Jenny mentioned that during a rare visit to 42 Lincoln, she had observed UB—sitting amidst his piles of disordered trash—using Wet-Wipes to sanitize each page of a book while he conversed with her.
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