INHERITANCE: “THE BLOW-UP”

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023 – At around 4:30, UB’s van appeared in the driveway. His return signaled that it was time to take another run at sorting out Mother’s inheritance. He acknowledged me but not uncivilly, which meant he withheld a negative greeting such as the “Uh-oh” I’d received the day before. I followed him up the back entry ramp and into the house. He sat down in his wheeled chair, and I converted one of the “table chairs” into a sitting chair by transferring the stash of trash from the seat to another trash-covered horizontal surface.

He turned immediately to his diabetes-testing supplies and expressed concern about replenishing his prescription. Before long Cliff appeared, as he’d told me he would, ostensibly to check UB’s glucose but in reality to check on how I was fairing in pursuit of my mission. Since I hadn’t yet broached the subject, Cliff went straight to work in his new role as UB’s weekend medical aid. He administered the test proficiently, and when the result was favorable, Cliff expressed genuine delight.

After Cliff left, I convinced UB that we should go to the pharmacy to get his prescription filled. It was a slow drive to the CVS store in nearby Lyndhurst. It reminded me of drives with Grandpa 30 years before, when the part of his brain that managed control of the vehicle wasn’t communicating with the part that was recalling memories from the distant past.

We were all but out of gas, and soon after UB noticed, we rolled into the nearest service station and crawled to the pump. I immediately alighted from the van to handle fueling, but UB yelled out that there was no self-service in New Jersey. As I re-entered the vehicle, I remarked about the added cost of the policy, whereupon UB defended the law rigorously, contending that it was “good not to have to handle the nozzle, which contained many germs.” While the attendant pumped gas into the tank, UB continued on an intense discourse about how “telephones and door knobs and handles had lots of germs too.”

Against the backdrop of his germ-infested trashed-out abode, I was surprised by the depth of UB’s germophobia. It underscored the manifold nature of his obsessive-compulsive disorder. To what extent, I wondered, did his OCD contribute to his inability to deal with Mother’s inheritance? Was his germophobia, for instance, related to his fear of mortality to the degree he couldn’t talk about things relating to death?

Once the gas tank was full, we puttered on to the drug store half a mile down the road. Enroute, I noticed street signs for “Kingsland Avenue”—Kingsland being the name of the exclusive area in which Gaga had lived as a child of privilege—and “Baldwin Avenue,” named after Gaga’s family.

The prescription, it turned out, was at a different CVS store, on the other side of Rutherford, but after a slow journey to that destination, we discovered that the pharmacy section was closed. UB insisted on trying the drive-through, which, of course, was closed as well, but in his approach, he got distracted by a row of recycling bins in exactly the same fashion that Grandpa would get distracted while driving: “Hmm. Wht do we hve hre?” I could see that UB was going to smack into a curb. I yelled “Look out!” but it was too late. BAM! My vertebrae felt the impact. UB was unfazed by the encounter, if he’d even noticed it.

After his re-enactment of a RAM-tough truck commercial, UB drove us to a diner for supper. He took our conversation down a road of bizarre and confrontational turns, in the course of which he issued repeatedly an angry fiat prohibiting all questions, no matter how mundane. He knew that the most innocent, superficial question could beget a whole series that would inevitably lead to a troubling substantive question. He knew my ultimate objective. If he’d failed to prevent my appearance in Rutherford, he was determined to muzzle any talk about Mother’s inheritance.

On the drive home, he slowed the van when we reached the bridge over the railroad tracks from East Rutherford to Rutherford. He pulled over to the side and stopped briefly. In full contrast with his harsh, opinionated monologue at the diner, he spoke with touching nostalgia. “Gaga used to take your mother and me here to watch the trains go by,” he said. “I think maybe that’s how I developed a love for train travel.” I was relieved by his calm voice but wondered about the mood swings I’d observed inside of an hour.

His mental state was in further question when we returned to the house. After he parked, he exited the van without turning off the ignition—until I drew it to his attention. Next, he picked up the long wand-nozzle to the garden hose to water his sprawling flower-garden, except the connection wasn’t good and leaked liberally onto his right right pant leg and shoe. He seemed oblivious to the malfunction.

Eventually, we entered the house, where he sat down on his “wheeled” chair in the kitchen. I sat on the chair I’d cleared earlier, gathered my breath and started in on the talk that was my whole reason for being there.

During my initial exposition, which I’d worked to death in anticipation of the opportunity to deliver it, he signaled comprehension and reasonableness by closing his eyes and nodding slowly, with an occasional, “Mmm, hm” and “I see.” At one point—eyes still closed—he went way out on a limb and said, “I’d have to run some cash flow projections before I could agree to that.” Suddenly, his mind flipped, setting off a Vesuvian eruption: standing up abruptly and shoving his chair into the stove with a bang, he shouted, “I’ll just sell everything, give your mother all the money, and kill myself!”

Pretty extreme, I thought, not to mention childish. The outburst was prelude to worse. He exited the kitchen, stomped off to where I’d positioned the step ladder the day before in anticipation of replacing the battery of the (still-chirping) fire alarm. With unusual force—certainly for an 84-year-old—he picked up the ladder, slammed it together, carried it back through the kitchen past me, used his right leg to open the door that had been left ajar, took three more strides through the entryway, kicked the outer door open, and hurled the six-foot-high ladder down the ramp. The terrible clatter echoed across the driveway.

As he then stormed out of the house, I called after him, “I’ll be here when you return!”

“Then I won’t return until tomorrow!”

To which I yelled back that I’d wait until tomorrow, and as the “Comet-spring” gate banged behind him, he screamed into the night, “I’ll stay away until you’re gone!”

I phoned Cliff to give him an update on my latest failure. I tried calling UB repeatedly, but he wouldn’t answer. Cliff tried, as well, with the same result. Two hours later, I called Cliff again.

“Still no Uncle Bruce,” I said, “and the last bus back to Port Authority leaves in half an hour. I need to be on it. I’m not spending the night here. But I’m worried about him.”

“You know what? Just leave. There’s a Marriot not far from there. He’ll probably check in there for the night. We could call and see if he’s there.”

“Cliff, he drove off but he left his wallet behind.[1]”

“You know, maybe he’s parked on the other side of Lincoln Park just waiting you out, just waiting until you leave. Just go, he’ll be fine.”

“Cliff, he talked about killing himself. I didn’t take him seriously at the time, but now I’m worried. He’s not just crazy. He’s stark raving mad at me. Who knows what he’s gonna do.”

“He’s not gonna kill himself. How would he send money to Alex if he went and killed himself?” Cliff laughed.

“You have a point,” I said in joinder with Cliff’s humor.

“Just go.”

I did but not before I’d written out a note in big block letters (in imitation of his own irrepressible style):

11:30 P.M.

DEAR UNCLE BRUCE

I’LL BE BACK. I’M SORRY WE DIDN’T GET A CHANCE TO FINISH OUR CONVERSATION. ON THE CHAIR IS A SPECIFIC PROPOSAL. FEEL FREE TO DISCUSS WITH [YOUR ACCOUNTANT].YOU MIGHT EVEN CHOOSE TO MAKE A COUNTER-PROPOSAL. WHAT’S MOST IMPORTANT, THO, IS THAT YOU BRING THIS MATTER TO PROPER RESOLUTION. IT’S VITAL THAT YOU TREAT MOTHER FAIRLY, JUSTLY, AND DO THE RIGHT THING. THIS MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE YOU SEND ANY MORE FUNDS TO ALEX, WHO, AS I SAID, IS USING YOU.

KNOW THIS: WE (MOTHER, K, E, J, C, AND I) LOVE YOU, CARE ABOUT YOU. BUT THIS ISN’T JUST ABOUT YOU. IT’S ABOUT OUR FAMILY—YOUR FAMILY,MOST PARTICULARLY, GAGA AND GRANDPA’S DAUGHTER, YOUR SISTER, MY (K’S, E’S, J’S) MOTHER.

LOVE,

ERIC[2]

With that I left the house.

The next morning I caught a cab from Jenny and Garrison’s apartment down to Port Authority and boarded a bus back to Rutherford. I called Cliff as I hiked down Highland Cross from Ridge Road to Lincoln Avenue.

“What’s happenin’?”

“I’m now at Ridge Road descending from the mountaintop down to the valley of darkness.”

Cliff laughed, then told me that Hector, the medical aid Cliff had hired to check on UB each weekday morning, had called Cliff at 9:00 all worried about UB—who was still nowhere to seen.

I let myself into the house and found it just as I had left it the night before—though given the haphazard arrangement of things, I thought, how would I really know? I wandered about the ground floor thinking, even hoping, that UB would magically appear.

On his boldly hand-printed prescription matrix taped abundantly to the kitchen wall I noticed that he was to have taken all his meds—for heart and diabetes—at 8:00. I worried mildly about his failure to do so. I was more concerned about his whereabouts. Was he dead of a heart attack, slouched over in his van in a ditch somewhere? Or . . . was the van parked on the bridge over the railroad tracks and his body on the tracks below mutilated beyond recognition by a dozen night trains?

Ten fifteen came and went. Still no UB. Another half hour and my cab would arrive for the ride to Newark Liberty for my noon flight home. I killed time by making a game of guessing whether in each room, the clocks outnumbered the thermometers. By the 10^th room, it was a tie.

At 11:00, the cab appeared in front of the house. For perhaps only the third time in my life, I exited the house through the front portico. It would be the last I’d see of 42 Baghdad Street for over two years.

Early that evening Cliff called to inform me of UB’s return. “Beep-beep!” said Cliff.  “Ya gotta admit it: after round 2,000, it’s Uncle Bruce 2,000, Cliff and Eric zero.”

We never learned how or where UB had spent the night.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson

[1] For years he’d tied his wallet to a 3 x 5 carpet sample on the theory that by such a method he’d never lose his wallet. That worked as long as he kept the carpet sample in his pocket, but in his chronic absent-mindedness, which had prompted deployment of the cord-and-carpet wallet anchor in the first place, he’d often remove both the wallet and the carpet anchor and lose both under several layers of paper.

[2] If UB didn’t read my note, he didn’t throw it away. A decade later, within the exponentially expanded heaps of paper that filled the house, I uncovered the original—along with multiple copies. He never discarded a note, letter or document but did just the opposite: copied it at least twice.