AUGUST 24, 2023 – I remember well the day: Sunday, September 20, 1998. After a restless sleep as a guest at Jenny and Garrisons’s Upper West Side apartment, I decided it would serve me well to go to church, more for refuge than anything else. And if revelations, observations, conversations of the past week impelled me to visit a house of God, why shouldn’t I head for Une Grande Maison—the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, mother ship of the New York Diocese of the Episcopal Church? After all . . . it was Mother’s denomination and therefore, the one in which I’d been reared, albeit kicking and screaming.
Yet I harbored doubt, frightening doubt. Was my destination, my faith, my obedience to my God just another manifestation of the family disease? Mother exhibited the same signs of eccentricity, chemical imbalance, mental disease that UB displayed in an uninterrupted fashion, and my pilgrimage to the great cathedral, when I considered the impulse, seemed to be inspired—way deep down—by Mother’s influence. I wanted to extinguish this impulse, but if I did, I wondered, would any faith remain? Would I continue to the cathedral or would I turn straight around? The possibility of reversing direction troubled me.
I couldn’t remember if I had ever before entered the magnificent cathedral. If I had visited, it must have been decades before, because many cathedrals, primarily European, had surely overshadowed any memories of this one. In any event, it did not disappoint. Once inside the glorious landmark, I was unable to exit. Not even an atheist, I thought, could escape the draw of its grandeur.
I arrived just as the processional approached the altar. Heavy clouds of incense arose from the front of the parade of high priests, led by the Bishop, his entourage of Very Right Reverends, just plain Right Reverends, and garden variety deacons. This being the “choral eucharist,” grand music filled the Gothic heights. As I stood there amidst the music and the drifting cloud of incense, this so-called house of God seemed bigger, just then, than the world itself. I felt overwhelmed. Tears of pain, doubt, anger, and sorrow rushed from my heart and poured into an ever-deeper recess within me, into a sanctum where God’s hands clutched my soul and squeezed it until tears turned to joy. I wanted to cry on God’s shoulder, and as the processional music drew to a close, real tears welled up in my eyes.
Every aspect of the liturgy, from the Creed to the Confession, struck at the Holman mess, just nine miles away as the crow flew. The Gospel, which featured the parable of the servant who compromised his master’s loans to debtors after he, the servant, was given his pink slip, left me groping for the proper analogy to Holman’s. I thought about how UB had compromised the family legacy, perhaps to spite Grandpa’s neglect (rejection?) of him.
Then, to complicate further my feelings about the Holman’s, the other untamed gorilla in my life—my bank job and its dim prospects—started beating its chest. What was to become of me? I thought. In how many of my failures, inadequacies, deficiencies at work, at home, in life generally, resided the genetic demons that now haunted me? How much of the Holman mess, the Holman train wreck, as it were, was me? How much of it was my inheritance?
Several aspects of the cathedral service temporarily diverted me from these troubling questions, but the distractions themselves led my thoughts full circle.
First came the announcement about “special guests.” At the front of the congregation was a group of 40 or so Japanese young people. They looked of high school age, maybe older, and their attire, which was not uniform, was a peculiar distortion of Western style clothes—eccentric imitations, you might say, of Western dress clothes. The boys’ suits were ill-fitting, oversized, cheap, polyester. More than one wore white running shoes with a navy blue suit. Likewise, the girls. When the lot of them were introduced, they stood up and took bows—stiff, formal bows, first in one direction, then another, then another. It all reminded me of their tradition-bound society, which over time, had produced a dichotomy of brutality on the one hand, and supreme devotion to order and beauty, on the other. I wondered about their religious backgrounds and beliefs. Were these young Japanese the legacy of Western Christian missionaries to Asia or students still bound to Japanese religious traditions and some kind of improbable cross-religious/cultural exchange? In any event, I considered contrasts between Shintoism and Christianity, and the possibility that both systems—not to mention other faiths—were equally eccentric, each with deluded, if not insane, followers.
Yet, I pondered further, if Mother’s deep religiosity was a manifestation of a disordered mind, UB, who was also cursed with a troubled brain, exhibited no religious faith whatsoever. And Grandpa had been a faithful church member, while Gaga was an avowed atheist. I couldn’t reconcile any of these observations.
The second distraction was the speech (in lieu of a sermon) by Didier Opperti, the Uruguayan President-elect of the UN General Assembly. His curriculum vitae was impressive but in no way surprising for a diplomat of his stature. He was also married and father of four children. I wondered, With his exhaustive (if not exhausting) list of achievements, what kind of family man was he? Or was his resume in that department rather brief and inconsequential? How similar was it to Grandpa’s in his relationship with UB? Was Grandpa’s exhaustive list of achievements in the world of business—and the concomitant neglect of UB during the latter’s youth—also part of my inheritance?
The offertory was a third diversion from thoughts about Holman’s . . . except it too circled back. It was a Mozart choral piece, which was as divine as any aspect of the cathedral in which the music rose and spread and filled with light, life and beauty. This acted as a salve on the open psychological wounds that pulled me to the precipice of my own ostensible mental breakdown. But just then I remembered my ride with Grandpa nearly 20 years before, when he and I were on our way to visit his driver Pete, and upon reaching a “Mozart Street,” Grandpa pronounced it, “Mo-Zart.” The music—whose divinity had been unknown (apparently) by Grandpa—then receded into the background, and I found myself dwelling upon what Cliff had revealed about UB.
Cliff’s dark revelations continued to turn in my thoughts until I stepped from my pew to join other congregants in the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the sharing of the body and blood of Christ. But just what was this ritual? A form of symbolic cannibalism? A trigger event for Mother’s insanity? And what caused UB’s insanity to propel him toward darkness, while Mother’s insanity led her to hyper-religion, with the Lord’s Supper as its centerpiece?
Beginning with the post-communion hymn and continuing right through the benediction and postlude, my mind wallowed in the depths of the Holman mess. My brooding smoldered until it ignited in flames of anger. And then occurred the transition to hate. Yes, I felt hate toward UB; an awful feeling, a terrible emotion, a de-humanizing impulse. I imagined pushing him down the elevator shaft, killing him, murdering his memory, expunging him from my life, all in the name of justice, all to right the wrongs that stemmed from his crazy, selfish mind. I imagined the process by which I would extinguish the hereditary link to the evil illness that gripped my grandparents’ legacy.
Only by sheer will did I break—or rather, suspend—my fall into oblivion. As worshippers began to file out of the cathedral, I realized that except for the offertory, the service had brought no peace. Along the course of my own exit from God’s house, I saw the “Poet’s Corner,” and thought, Maybe that can bring me solace. There on the floor stones were inscribed quips and quotations by famous writers and poets. I jotted several down, and pondered them:
Thy will be done in art as it is in heaven. –Willa Cather. I thought about the rather sizable quantity of really bad, original oil paintings by no-name French artists, which paintings UB had acquired in the early 1960s, thinking he could sell them to a mass market in America—”At Ben Franklin stores,” he had once told me . . . “or K-Mart.”
All you have to do is write one true sentence. –Earnest Hemingway. When it came to one true sentence about my inheritance, what would it be?
Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to. –Henry James. First I must run clear of the Holman legacy, except, does that not mean running clear of myself?
Then I encountered the one most appropriate for what I had to confront across the Hudson River:
All to the beautiful order of thy works, learn to conform the order of our lives. –William Cullen Bryant. Perhaps the greatest challenge before me was not to change what was but to accept it. Would I ever be able to accept things? I thought not.
I stood there undisturbed for five minutes or so, but then a woman, off-key and probably as crazy as anyone, barged in on my peace, walked across the inscribed stones, and like a turkey on alert, looked down, looked up, looked around, and blurted out, “What is this anyway?”
“The Poet’s Corner,” I mumbled. I then turned and left the cathedral, poet inscriptions and . . . woman with a troubled mind.
As I walked down Amsterdam, the Holman demon chased me. I battled it. I fought, I slashed, and screamed silently in retaliation. Anger and hate grew so large within my heart, it burst and broke and spilled and poured and gushed bitter blood out of my pores, down my body, over my feet, and soaked the earth. I imagined myself next to a pile of five-pound stones, perfectly round, like baseballs. I picked them up, one after another and hurled them at 42 Lincoln. I smashed windows, furniture, bones and bodies. Holman bones. UB bones. Then, the stones turned to grenades, and I tossed them at my targets till nothing remained but a pile of rubble. I had never known that such hate, such anger, such horrific emotion had dwelled or could dwell within me, and I then hated all the more that the Holman insanity could find its way into my soul, let the devil in and destroy me as it had destroyed UB. I wept bitterly.
My anger carried me right down the middle of Amsterdam, through a 10- or 12-block street fair between about 105th and 96th. Gradually my anger dissipated and in its place arrived depression. I turned west at 96th all the way to West End and then south to Jenny and Garrison’s apartment.
Jenny suggested that we all—she, Garrison, their young daughter Maia, and I—go for a stroll in Riverside Park, with an intermediate stop at a fish and bagel shop in the neighborhood. By the time we reached the park, my emotions had subsided, and I strove to enjoy the company of my fellow strollers. They were in a pleasant mood, and I found their presence calming and reassuring.
In time, I actually developed half a notion to go back over to Rutherford that very afternoon and do some work, any work, to advance my mission there. So much needed to be accomplished. My time was limited before I would have to return to Minnesota, and there I was, over in Manhattan, self-indulgent as ever with respect to my thoughts and emotions. Jenny counseled against going to Rutherford. Perhaps she knew the toll it had already taken on me, though she had witnessed none of my psychological meltdown. “I think Uncle Bruce needs a rest,” she said. “He’s probably weighed down pretty heavily by all the difficult issues you’ve opened up to him—things he’s chosen to ignore for all too long.” Her wise advice cinched my decision. I would stay in New York for the rest of the day, the day of rest, at least in the lives of our Christian ancestors.
We picnicked in the park and strolled down to the pier at around 72nd Street and Riverside. Jenny, Garrison, and Maia then headed home, and for the next couple of hours, I hiked to the south end of the park and back, ever so slowly, alone with my thoughts, immersed in an enormously difficult reconcilement of dichotomous emotions—love, hate; hope, despair.
The plan announced and the plan fulfilled for the evening was to go out to dinner—Jenny, Garrison, and I—at Les Café des Artistes over near 73rd and Amsterdam. Jenny and I headed over ahead of Garrison who stayed behind to wait for Maia’s babysitter to arrive back at the apartment. The restaurant proved to be as posh as its name was pretentious. Jenny called it a “geezer” restaurant and called my attention to other patrons who met this description.
When Garrison appeared, he kissed Jenny’s hand with a theatrically romantic display. Several heads at neighboring tables, I could tell, turned to observe this pleasantly old-fashioned, if not geezer-like, gesture. Garrison was in a light-hearted mood, and Jenny responded with a warm affectionate smile. This was the place where they had first shared lunch, where the spark of love had lit the fire of romance; the garden of dreams, where once upon a time, two lovers had met, dined, and talked, then left to live happily ever after. I could feel my psychological keel recovering in preparation for the conversation that would surely ensue.
Mostly to bring Garrison into the know, we talked a fair amount about our time in Hamburg the day before and about my time in Rutherford the week before that. He listened with great interest, turning his head slightly, as if to hear better, while maintaining close eye contact, as if to read me better. He offered some serious, as well as humorous observations about UB and the whole extended psychological and physical mess that resided at Holman Corner, just nine miles away. I recalled—silently of course—how Garrison himself had once visited 42 Lincoln, years before, and with a writer’s view, had taken mental snapshots of the kitchen, with UB’s eccentricities manifested throughout[1], and inserted them smack dab into the center of his best-selling novel, Wobegon Boy—all to my displeasure, for I considered such “snapshots” to be proprietary to my sisters and me, for use in the book that one of us was bound to write about “Holman Boy.”
After a multi-course meal, dessert, and after-dinner aperitif, we strolled back to the apartment. Jenny checked the answering machine and found that Nina had called. I thought it was too late to call her back, but apparently Nina didn’t think so. At 10:30, she called again. She and I talked more about how to deal with UB over Hamburg, but our conversation then drifted to the bigger Holman picture and the Holman heredity factor. How much of the mess, we pondered, was genetic?
Nina and I had always communicated well with each other. We shared a common understanding of the world and our place in it. Whether it was an accurate understanding is another whole matter, but we viewed things from a remarkably similar angle. During our conversation late that evening, Nina described various examples of what she felt was her own unsettling behavior.
For instance, twelve years before, when the radioactive mishap at Chernobyl had occurred, Nina was utterly convinced that life as we knew it would be wiped out. She actually went to the effort of trying to obtain cyanide pills for her and her family from the pain and suffering of death by radiation. She listed a host of other, lesser worries that control and demonize her life—fear of food poisoning, fear of impure water, fear of flying, fear of one thing and another. The seemingly limitless list of phobias and extreme anxieties was remarkably similar to the list that Jenny had divulged to me a couple of evenings before. I thought about UB’s obsession with the danger of falling through the opening in the outbuilding up at Hamburg.
I laughed heartily, but also nervously, for I saw in these fears, my own fears, my own demons, which clawed and scratched and tore and pounded at my confidence, my talents, my abilities. On one hand, it was a comfort to know that I had at least two siblings who traveled through life exactly as I did, who travailed under the same constant burden of worry. I now began to see that my own fears were based far more on genetics than on reason or reality.
Nina confirmed the hereditary factor by reading over the phone a letter that Mother had recently sent to Erica. It was classic Mother—and perhaps, classic us. A couple of weeks before the letter, a violent electrical storm had caused an interruption of power at Nina’s house in Newton, Massachusetts. Erica wound up doing her homework by candlelight, and had casually mentioned this to Mother during a subsequent telephone conversation. Mother worried so much about it, she wrote a letter to Erica, replete, I supposed, with her trademark random underscoring of words. After Nina read it, I had her cover it slowly so I could write it down verbatim:
Dear Erica,
It was nice visiting with you the other night. The storm certainly sounded exciting. We’re glad you were able to complete your homework but worry about your use of candlelight, considering the danger associated with open flame. Enclosed is our check for $41.00 so you can purchase a flashlight and be fully prepared for the next time the power goes off. We looked at several stores—Target, Walmart and K-Mart—and concluded that K-Mart has the best to offer.
As Nina read, I wondered if it was mere coincidence that Mother’s favorite source of cheap merchandise—K-Mart—was also UB’s favorite. Was that genetic too? I laughed to myself.
It’s called a “Storm Flash” and sells for $39.00 but with sales tax comes to about $41.00. We recommend that you keep it in a place where you will remember, preferably near your bed so it will be handy if you lose power at night. In order that you not strain your eyes, we recommend that you use the flashlight only in an emergency. Also, Grandpa reminds us that we should check the batteries on a regular basis, especially if we haven’t been using battery-operated appliances, etc. on a regular basis.
If you must use candles, be sure that they are placed away from open windows, especially if there are lace curtains close by. These can ignite quickly and cause a serious fire. Candles should be placed on a level surface and ideally, in a bowl filled with water so that if the candle tips, it will fall harmlessly in the water . . .
Love,
/s/
Grandma
It was well past midnight before we concluded our conversation. Exhausted, I went to bed and slept so hard, I didn’t dream.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Garrison had picked right up on things that would strike any visitor right in the nose—literally. The centerpiece was the pull chain to the overhead, fluorescent light, which pull chain dangled down to face level of any medium-sized adult and bore a piece of bright orange yarn tied to the end, along with a placard with bold lettering in UB’s script, reading LIGHT SWITCH. Many other things were labeled in similar fashion, as if the occupants were first-graders learning how to read. My favorite item, however, was the postage stamp dispenser that UB had fashioned out of the end of the box for a bottle of cough medicine and taped onto a kitchen cabinet door. Of course, there was a sign taped above it, reading, POSTAGE STAMPS with an arrow pointing down to the dispenser.
