INHERITANCE (PROLOGUE)

JUNE 2, 2023 – If I weren’t the storyteller, I wouldn’t believe this story.  So far, no one who has heard it believes it, except Cliff, who has survived the most critical parts of it, and my sisters, because I’ve told them everything and they themselves have lived enough of the story to know I’m not exaggerating or making stuff up.  If UB were still alive, he wouldn’t believe the parts about himself, because he simply didn’t see things the way the rest of us have to. That’s what made him UB. If Mother were still alive, she wouldn’t believe the parts that she didn’t know about her brother and only sibling.  Or more precisely, she wouldn’t want to believe them, and often when a person doesn’t want to believe something, it’s the same thing as not believing it in the first place. So that’s why I say, the only people beyond me who will ever really believe this story are Cliff and my sisters.

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By way of one small example of the story’s inconceivability, a big part emanates from a collection of brick, ramshackle warehouses in a New Jersey town nicknamed, “The Borough of Trees,” just 20 minutes from Manhattan.  Not so long ago these warehouses were crammed with such abandoned property as a row of grand pianos stored on their sides, a vintage horse-drawn buggy in mint condition, huge racks filled with cheap but original art by really bad French painters, a massive entanglement of silverware (4,351 pieces, according to the yellow tally sheet left on a window sill), and Cliff’s favorite prop, a badly decomposed corpse-in-a-coffin, which was definitely not abandoned but fully rentable. That’s just a sampling of the stuff I know about.  If the warehouses were filled with treasure, though, the local fire chief didn’t see it that way.  He once told Cliff, “If the place catches fire, we’re gonna be late.”  But the warehouses are just an important stage for the story. The story is about brains, love, family, dysfunction, insanity, loyalty, truth and grace and really old age.  It’s about beauty and an utter lack of it; compassion, delusion and obsession; hilarity and tragedy; faith and atheism; classic American enterprise at its best, and a cast of very bizarre characters.  But the story is mostly because of ‘UB,’ as my sisters and I called him, though only in writing and never in speaking.

Cliff called him that too when he wrote to me.  Cliff is a character.  People who don’t know him as well as I do would count him among the “cast of very bizarre characters,” but that wouldn’t be fair or accurate.  Despite his licentious days as a local rock n’ roll star, Cliff is a rare and genuine angel.  He’s one of those people who voted for Obama . . . and Trump. In fact, for years he was in charge of putting on lavish parties for the Trump Organization, and in Cliff’s office hangs an autographed photo of Cliff and Trump standing side by side, competing for the broadest smile award. But I don’t hold any of that against him. The day after the 2020 election, Cliff called me to say, “I’ve gotta admit—the better man won.” And he meant Joe Biden.

In any event, I can’t imagine the story that would have unfolded without Cliff. Most likely, UB would have been dead before he died for real in his 96^th year.

I repeat, lest there be any doubt in my mind: the story is true.  As Cliff so often said along the way, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

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The story began long before I came along.  Mother would have said it began in 1621—the year some of our ancestors disembarked from the Fortune and joined the original Pilgrims in Plymouth Bay Colony. However, that ancestry is too diluted to be of much interest to me, let alone you.  By all practical standards, the story began about 80 years before I was born in 1954.  Through the course of my younger years, I had witnessed first-hand a number of middle chapters develop, but it wasn’t until one day in September 1998 when I realized that those chapters belonged to a much broader story. 

I remember my exact place when the revelation struck: halfway up the stairs from the first floor of the grand old house that my great-grandparents had built in 1910.  The mahogany treads, once richly dark red, were now unnaturally pale from the thousands of gallons of water that local firefighters, aided by departments from surrounding communities, had poured over the blaze just a month before my “revelation.” Yet at the end of that horrific night, the house remained standing.  The slate roof over the servant quarters on the third floor had been consumed by flame and the rest of the house (except the billiard room) had sustained heavy water damage, but the integrity of the place had withstood the awful assault.  It was now gutted of furniture, furnishings and fixtures—the Tiffany lamps, the glorious antiques, the French tapestry and matching upholstery, along with all of the junk and . . . all the unmentionables, which, eventually, I’ll have to mention, because, well, they’re very much a part of the story.

Anyway, I was trudging up the steps to the second floor, thence to the third, to throw some old tarps over the charred rafter stubs to keep animals and elements from invading quarters below.  It was a typical UB operation, but what could I do?  There was no telling him how to do things.  As I rounded the landing midway to the second floor, I stopped to ponder the whitened treads.  Then and there the revelation hit: it wasn’t a fire that had destroyed this mansion.  It was an inherited mental disease. And whatever my inheritance might have been, this story would be the family legacy—for me to write and for my heirs to read.

But I quickly tucked those thoughts away.  I could hear UB dragging a ladder through the back doorway of the house. Soon he would be on my heels.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson