SEPTEMBER 12, 2023 – At noon on Saturday I appeared at the back door of 42 Baghdad Street. My knocking prompted a loud unwelcoming “Hello!” Quick footsteps to the doorway followed but the door opened only enough for UB to identify his visitor.
“Uh-oh,” he said. It wasn’t the friendly “uh-oh” of faux-dismay but an “uh-oh” that projected deep-seated aversion.
After a second or two he reluctantly allowed me entry, not by uttering words of invitation but by turning back into the house and leaving the door ajar. I proceeded into the kitchen, where he lingered, and on my own initiative I removed a stack of papers from one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. He took the chair that was on wheels and already free and clear of stuff—the only chair in the house that was actually used as a chair, not a table.
He knew full well the purpose of my visit, but before I could open my mouth, he began his filibuster. With head back and eyes closed, he spewed a stream of words between his thin barely parted but animated lips. He maintained exactly that pose for about 20 minutes as he recounted in detail his recent trip with Cliff to Vermont to visit his old friend, Dick Hamilton of Hogback Ski Area (by then defunct), Boston to visit Nina and Dean, and Hamburg in a rare check-in at the Cove house.
When Dr. Jekyll’s rambling monologue came to an end, he opened his eyes, whereupon I raised the subject of Mother’s inheritance.
“Is that why you came here?” barked Mr. Hyde. “Because if it is, you can leave right now—good-bye.”
He knew exactly why I was back in New Jersey, and I reminded him that he’d asked me to send a proposal, so I had; and I’d informed him that soon I’d be back to discuss it. “Now that I’m here,” I said, “we have to discuss it.”
With fangs still bared, he said he’d let his accountant “deal with it.”
He seethed until his agitation boiled over. “See what you’ve done,” he said, as he grabbed for the blood pressure testing device that was mixed up with all the clutter on the stove top.
I held my breath as he administered the test. His ruse failed, however: his numbers were normal.
Dr. Jekyll returned. “There was a leak in the toilet upstairs,” he said. “The water migrated through the floor into the bedroom then down here into the kitchen. You can see what it did to the ceiling panels. I peered up at his convenient diversion.
After the Great Fire UB had had some cheap contractor install a dropped ceiling of acoustical panels below the original 9-foot-high ceiling. The renovation had looked atrocious to begin with[1], and now a large section was grossly discolored from bad toilet water.
“Those panels need to be replaced,” he said to lead me further astray from my mission.
Off to the side were some replacement panels. I wanted to say that having priority over replacement of the discolored panels was “Mother’s inheritance, not to mention removal of organic trash from the kitchen and the source of bad smells emanating from the adjoining, insanely designed post-fire bathroom.” Instead I bit my tongue nearly in half. I offered to replace the goddamn panels, which, with measured tone I called aloud, “the panels.”
UB rose from his “wheeled” chair and said under his breath, “I’ll get a ladder.” Out the door he went, and I watched as he stomped down the rotting ramp from the back door and opened the gate at the end just beyond. The gate closed with a bang as it always had thanks to the rusty spring wound around an empty Comet container for extra tension—his cockamamy system that had been in place since Gaga’s knees had given out a quarter of a century before her death . . . a dozen years before the day at hand[2]. He crossed the wide drive to the backside of the warehouses, then disappeared around the corner to the “people” entrance next to the main door of the warehouse and equipment garage.
A minute later, the big door powered up, and through the doorway emerged the nearly 84-year old man with a mind of his own—and an industrial-size aluminum stepladder. With little trouble he hauled the ladder back to the house. Banging through the entryway, he then opened the ladder and planted it under the group of panels I’d volunteered to replace.
As he did so, the fire alarm in the hallway chirped again. I’d noticed it during UB’s filibuster, but the annoyance was eventually absorbed by countless other annoyances in my surroundings. “After the panels,” I said, “I’ll replace the fire alarm battery if you can scare up a replacement.”
He didn’t answer. By now my mission was fully on hold as the panel replacement task turned into a major project, given the tool-gathering, careful measurements and precision cutting involved to fit the new panels around various obstacles. Watching over my shoulder was not UB, who’d wandered off to other corners of the house, but figuratively Dad, whose unfailing adherence to order and precision gave me inspired me to emulate him in silent defiance of UB.
Two hours later I found gratification in the result. As I collected the tools, UB passed through the room. He barely glanced at the ceiling and said, “It was like that once before.” I’d half-expected a “thanks,” but imagined Cliff saying, “You have insanely high expectations.”
Dr. Jekyll then assumed his all-too familiar Road Runner role: it was time for a trip to the grocery store . . . by himself. I suspected a trip to Western Union might be involved as well. In any event, I was mildly surprised that he would leave me alone in the house. He had to know I’d snoop, rifle, and rummage and even walk off with “things that weren’t mine”—such as more cassette tapes filled with damning evidence that he posed a serious risk to own welfare.
I figured I had less than an hour, which was barely enough to begin excavation of the papers atop the kitchen table—the actual one—not the chairs, including the one that I’d cleared and occupied and that he’d restored to its table status while I was engaged in the panel project.
For comic relief, I decided to have a little fun at UB’s expense . . .
. . . Over the years, he’d developed a clock fetish. In every room of the house were at least two, often more timepieces. Cheap ones; K-Mart specials. UB’s insane obsession with junk clocks contrasted with George B. Holman’s eminently sane hobby: collecting valuable antique mantel clocks, all of which had been stored on the third floor, where they were among the first casualties of the Great Fire. UB had filled the house with so many clocks it was impossible for one person to determine how many were synchronized.
(In a related obsession, so UB could monitor the ambient temperature throughout each room, he’d also placed thermometers . . . throughout each room, again, K-Mart products often still in the packaging. Without hesitation, he’d nail many of these straight into the drywall, but at least in the library, the dining room and the billiard room, he’d had the sense not to drive hanging nails into the (ruined) mahogany, most likely because the wood was too hard.)
Two large members of UB’s kitchen clock collection rested on top of the stove dashboard and leaned against the wall. One was set to “NEW YORK” time—according to UB’s shout-it-out label—and the other, “LONDON,” with the hour hand set five hours ahead of local time. They could just as well have been marked, “BRUCE” and “ALEX.”
So . . . just for the fun of it, I switched the “London” clock to New York time and amused myself by wondering how long it would take UB to notice.
After moving the ladder to the chirping fire alarm in case a replacement battery surfaced, I then wandered over to Cliff’s office to apprise him of my mission’s failure.
“What’s happenin’?” he said, as he closed the door to his office, and I plopped down in a chair.
“I failed. The grand master shut me down in about seven seconds.”
Cliff laughed—in empathy and commiseration. We talked for a while about the setback in my mission. Cliff gave me his usual pep talk, told me to go back to the city for the night to recharge at Jenny and Garrison’s apartment and try again the next day, Sunday.
Before heading down to the bus stop at Station Square, I checked to see if UB had returned yet from the store. When I saw that he had, I re-entered the house and called out to him. He didn’t answer. I found him in his recliner, surrounded by newspapers, in the middle of what used to be the elegant dining room and was now a trashed out sitting room with mahogany walls in ruin. He was glancing through that day’s edition of The New York Times.
“Well, Uncle Bruce,” I said, “I’m going to head out now, but I do want to come back tomorrow to discuss what’s fair and just for Mother. It’s not something your accountant can decide. It’s something that you need to deal with.”
He said nothing in return. Absolutely nothing. I told him I hoped he’d take care of himself and sleep well. Dismissively, he turned several pages of the newspaper. I left in silence.
When I reached the bus stop at other end of Park Avenue I phoned Mother to pre-empt any further attempt on UB’s part to divide and conquer. When I gave a brief sketch of what had transpired, she insisted on covering for him. “He was probably tired,” she said, “and was upset that you’d surprised him.” I realized he’d already gotten to her.
“No, I didn’t surprise him. He simply doesn’t want to deal with the fact he’s been sending gobs of your money to a drug addict in London.”
“But it’s not my money until it is,” she said.
“Mother, that’s nonsense,” I said, unable to hide my frustration. “Besides, Alex is a drug addict, I swear.” Soon the bus to Port Authority appeared. Another 20 minutes and I’d be at 42nd Street, a million miles away from 42 Baghdad Street.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Cliff and I were equally disgusted with UB’s “anti-aesthetic” streak. In addition to being the world’s biggest cheapskate—except when doling out cash to the gold-bricking Serbian drug addict—UB was aggressively contemptuous of aesthetic refinement. His renovations to 42 Lincoln struck me as an almost intentional effort to reduce the value of Mother’s one-half interest—a factor that I thought best not to highlight explicitly in the outline I’d sent him.
[2] The banging gate triggered recall: the whole reason for the gate and adjoining fence had been confinement of “Taffy,” the little schizophrenic poodle that UB had given Gaga back in the late 70s. Normally cute, friendly as could be, and a perfect lapdog, Taffy was ferociously loyal to Gaga. Without warning or provocation of any sort, he’d go on a rampage against any human who got between him and Gaga. Targets included UB, who often cuddled Taffy and addressed his every whim and need. Gaga outlived Taffy by a good many years, but lasting to 100, she outlived all of her human friends, as well—except Emily Jones, Grandpa’s secretary, whose informal company retirement plan included low-rent occupancy of the the big house next door that Grandpa owned. “Miss Jones” lived to be 106.
