SEPTEMBER 6, 2023 – Cliff and I had labored over the presentation.
First was my script, for it was decided that since I was the true nephew, it was important for me to deliver the message, though I was “Minnesota,” and Cliff was “New Jersey,” and the message definitely had to be “New Jersey Direct” not “Minnesota Nice.” The “contract” we’d jointly drafted the previous week was the guide, of course, but my spoken words had to be just that—spoken, not read.
Second, we had to consider the setting, and having been derailed on the first attempt, we were not about to hand the hospital staff (as well-intentioned as they were) any information that would cause them to stop us this time. UB had a roommate, so we would have to find another space for privacy. But where? We couldn’t depend on the family visiting lounge to be unoccupied, and even if it were available, we wouldn’t be able to prevent intrusions in the midst of our presentation. I knew from my visit the morning before that UB preferred sitting in a recliner in a corner beside his bed, out of view of the doorway to his double room. Thus, our first move would be to walk undetected past his room from the elevator to the nurses’ station a few doors down the corridor. There we’d explain that we were Mr. Holman’s nephews and had some family matters that we needed to discuss in private and ask for a room, any room, where we could do so. That part we’d have to play by ear.
Then there were all kinds of contingencies to anticipate. What if UB didn’t want to get out of his chair? What if he said, “I just went for a walk, and I’m not supposed to get up for awhile”? What if he tried to disarm us with more, clever chess moves? What if he were sound asleep when we got there? What if he resisted or argued or really flipped out? What if he suddenly got short of breath? What if he had a heart attack in reaction to our laying down the law? “For that one,” Cliff laughed, “we’re covered—he is in the cardiac ward, don’t forget.”
Upon pulling into a parking spot at the hospital, Cliff reminded me that the message absolutely had to be delivered that evening, since I would be returning to Minnesota early the next morning, and thus, our window of opportunity was closing fast.
According to plan, we walked straight past UB’s room—unnoticed by UB, who was pontificating to his roommate. Truthfully, my heart raced ahead to the nurses’ station and waited anxiously for us to catch up. “Excuse me,” I said quietly, cognizant of UB’s acute hearing,[1] “but we’re the nephews of Mr. Holman in 312A, and we need to talk to him in private about some family matters. Is there somewhere we could go?”
“MR. HOLMAN?” the nurse said in a loud, New Jersey-Spanish accent, as if she were calling out to him directly. She then turned to another nurse down the hallway and broadcast UB’s name again: “Bonita, these are MR. HOLMAN’S NEPHEWS and they want a private room to talk. Is there somewhere they can take MR. HOLMAN?”
“They can take MR. HOLMAN to the family lounge,” Bonita answered for the world to hear, including, I feared, UB himself.
“Uh, we already checked in there,” I said in a near whisper, hoping that by example the megaphonic nurses would lower their volume, “and there are folks in there, and they don’t look as though they’re moving any time soon, and, well, we really need some privacy and . . .” The nurses huddled, and one said there was an office we could go to on the other side of UB’s room, but the door was locked, and no one had a key, so another nurse suggested the staff break room, directly across the hall from UB’s room, and no one was there—for now. So far, so good.
We proceeded to UB’s room. He was as alert as ever—and hatless and without his toupee but wearing his big, black over-coat, as if preparing to escape when the nurses weren’t watching. (Lately, he’d taken to wearing a tramp hat with a brim and was so insistent about not exposing his bald pate that even when he had to bare his upper body for various tests, he tried pathetically to remove his T-shirt without lifting the hat. As he struggled I imagined a drunk man wrestling with himself.) He looked good, actually, certainly better than any other patient we saw, and every bit as healthy as any of the staff 45 years his junior, despite his type-two diabetes and heart condition.
Cliff and I exchanged niceties with UB, asked how he felt, got the rundown on his latest vital signs, inquired of medications taken since my visit in the morning, and explained that we’d been in touch with the home-care people. We told him Young-hee had stopped by with lentil soup, which we’d given to the nurses to store in the ward’s refrigerator.
When a break occurred in the exchange, I seized the moment. Timing is everything in theater, and given our objective there was going to be plenty of theater. We helped UB out of the chair, though really, he needed little assistance, and with Cliff beside him and I behind, UB began a brisk, two-lap hike around the cardiac wing. Any other visitors would’ve thought he’d been hospitalized for an elbow injury, not open-heart surgery. He chattered away enroute, and I’m not sure how we got on the subject, but he recounted how he’d helped move Elsa when she in Philly and how he had loaded up his convertible—top down—with furniture for her apartment while she was at the Curtis Institute, and then he mentioned our trip to visit colleges and how I’d asked him which he preferred and he’d said “Bowdoin.”
Then, just as we were approaching the staff break room, I said, “Uncle Bruce, as you know, I’m leaving tomorrow morning, early, and we have some things we need to say.” Cliff and I had carefully edited this part of the script beforehand. We didn’t want to invite any discussion or elicit any argument, so we excised words like, “talk” and “discuss,” choosing instead, “say” and “tell.” “Let’s go in here,” I said, as I opened the door to our private “conference room.”
“Sure,” he said. He knew what was coming. He might have wished it away, but he knew there would be music—harsh, intense, jarring, and dissonant—and he would be forced to listen to it. The orchestra was tuned and quiet. For the first time in his life, I was conductor of the orchestra, and my baton was raised.
The room was tiny and furnished with tight-fitting cabinets, a small cheap round table, and four mis-matched chairs, each of a design that had long been out of style. UB sat on the chair that was pressed against the back wall. I sat down just in front of the door, which placed my wingtips about 10 inches from UB’s stocking feet. Cliff squeezed into a chair between the table and the wall facing UB. I don’t think it was lost on any of us that the setting was metaphorical: UB was corralled and cornered.
What I’m sure UB didn’t realize was that he wasn’t alone in his confinement. He was joined by 20, 40, 60, probably more years of roaring madness. Also trapped in that small, stuffy space were genetics, habits, environment, personality, circumstances, chance-encounters, a highly successful workaholic father, a protective mother, a high-achieving sister, relatives dead from old-age, cousins killed at a young age in the epochal war of their generation—a world war now 60 years past but having produced effects that had since brought bombs to Belgrade and uprooted a group of Serbs seeking a better life in London, then New York and into the life of the mad man in the corner now lighter by several hundred thousand dollars . . . or more . . . thanks to those very Serbs.
What was now cornered was a life gone terribly wrong and the stark reminder of how all of us who are or have been in this world are connected in one manner or another, whether we ask to be or seek not to be.
I looked UB in the eyes and found confidence in myself. I was no longer the kid, the student, the skier. I was the grown-up, the principal, and he was the juvenile delinquent in need of strict boundaries, if not deserving of harsh penalties. Everything to this point had gone perfectly. Now it was time for me to deliver my lines—and for UB to hear them.
“Uncle Bruce, what I have to say is not easy, and the only way I know how to say it is straight up.”
“Yes,” he said crisply, compliantly. It was the first that I noticed he was chewing gum. No, not chewing, chomping.
“What Cliff and I uncovered last week when we were preparing for your home recovery was absolutely appalling, especially in light of your brush with [redacted] eight years ago. But as natural as our reaction was, I realized—we both realized—that this was not something evil on your part but the manifestation of some deep, deep physiological and psychological disturbance, and that if we cared about you at all, if we loved you, if we felt an ounce of responsibility toward you, the family, and the family legacy, we would take responsibility and make sure that things change—starting now.”
“Clean slate, clean slate,” he said.
“Yes, exactly. A clean slate. So . . . at present, we’ve come up with five things that are absolutes and absolutely non-negotiable:
“First, we’ve arranged for a round-the-clock nurse’s aide to care for you for at least a week after you are released. We can scale back after that.
“Second, we’ve arranged for a maid service to come to the house once a week for as long as you live there, to ensure that your living conditions are safe and sanitary.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Uncle Bruce, still chomping hard on that gum. He looked like a young teenager who had been busted and was scared out of his shoes.
“Third, all of the pornography is gone. All of it. And it’s NE-VER-COM-ING BACK!”
“That’s right. It’s gone. Won’t come back,” he said.
“Fourth, Alex is voluntarily out of your life. You will not have any further contact with him or any of his associates. Not by phone, not by letter, not in person.”
“Yeah, he’s gone. No further contact, no,” said the scared teenager.
“Fifth, you will not transmit any money whatsoever to Alex or anyone connected to Alex. Not by wire, check or any other means. It’s over.”
“I think it was just filling a void,” said UB, offering the first hint that maybe he was open to psychiatric/psychological help.
“Yes, maybe,” I said, “and we’d really like to see you get professional help, and we’ll do everything we can to assist you in getting it.”
“Yeah, yep, yeah. Good. At least I didn’t [redacted],” said UB in apparent full surrender, but I wasn’t about to let this by without commenting.
[Redacted]
“Yeah, I know. You’re right.”
“Now,” I continued, after taking a breath, “I’m going to come back here to New Jersey on a regular basis to monitor things and to address other issues that need to be addressed, and in my absence, Cliff is going to have total access to everything in order to make sure you’re in compliance.”
“Okay.”
“And your compliance, Uncle Bruce, guarantees that Mother and Dad[2] will know none of this, and it ensures that my sisters will not have to see all the gory details.” I was careful to give myself some latitude with my sisters, whom I had already told a lot about the situation at 42 Baghdad Street.
“Yes, good, uh-huh. Full compliance.”
“Now, just to make sure, we’ve put this in writing, and we’re going to give you a chance to read it right here and now,” whereupon I pulled the “contract” from the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it to him to read—for him, the man who always touted that what favored him he put in writing, and what didn’t favor him, he didn’t put in writing. The room went silent as he read. And he read.
“Okay,” he said finally and looked up at us. He no longer looked like a troubled teenager but like a shabby, cowering, aged spaniel at the local animal rescue center. Cliff asked if he wanted to keep the papers with him or have us take them home. “Uh, home, I think, yes, home.”
Cliff and I then stood up, I put my arm around UB and told him that we would all now be in his life. We’d be calling, writing, and visiting him, because he is family and we love him and we don’t abandon family. He gripped my hand and shook it, and I sensed great relief on his part and felt much lighter myself. Cliff suggested one more lap around the floor, and UB agreed spontaneously. We walked, got him situated in his chair back in the room, asked if he needed or wanted anything, reminded him of the lentil soup that Young-hee had given us to pass on to him, bade farewell—to which he said, “Thanks for everything you’ve done”—and departed.
If at the outset Cliff and I had hoped to “checkmate” UB, the chess metaphor no longer seemed apt. What felt much more applicable was the image of the Berlin Wall coming down with surprising speed and certainty; the symbol of sick sad tragic criminal abusive inhumane long-immutable conditions suddenly and irrevocably overcome. As often as I myself had wallowed in despair, I was reminded that hope springs eternal.
Later, over dinner with Jeanette, Cliff said, “You know, Eric, we have a lotta hard work ahead of us, but today we took a giant step forward.”
“Yeah,” I said. It’s kinda like we won the election after a long, exhausting campaign, but now we have to govern.”
But as we cautiously celebrated our victory, Cliff and I conveniently ignored the Road Runner factor.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Definitely a Holman trait from a physiological standpoint. The entire nuclear family—Gaga, Grandpa, UB, and Mother—had excellent hearing into their 90s, though as noted earlier, Great Grandpa Holman suffered from stone deafness by age 70, a condition to which Mother ascribed his old age crankiness.
[2] Dad and UB were never close but treated each other amicably during UB’s annual Christmas visits to Minnesota. Every so often, however, UB would express admiration for Dad’s ability to “make and fix things.” As mentioned earlier, while rooming at my grandparents house in Dinkytown (U of M neighborhood of Minneapolis), UB had developed an abiding respect for Ga (our nickname for our Nilsson grandmother) and an affinity for her Swedish heritage. Some of this impression, I imagined, would have reflected well on Dad, who was from the same refined Swedish-perfectionist mold as his mother. If UB was at all in touch with reality, he would’ve been unspeakably embarrassed if Dad were to learn of the full extent of UB’s “trash and porn problem.”
