How My Queer Uncle Came to Die at Last

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2002 by Martin, Charles

How My Queer Uncle Came to Die at Last

(i.m. Frederick Martin 1909-1957)

I

Dear, debonair, intemperate,

Exotic, open, ordinary,

Precariously overweight,

Self-educated bon vivant,

Soft, sybaritic emissary

Of Dionysus to the Bronx,

And slyly uninhibited

Life of the party, Uncle Fred

Dropped by a massive heart attack

Quite plausibly, the truth to tell,

One afternoon on his way back

From a late lunch at Child's or Schrafft's:

As he lay dying where he fell,

His large ironic spirit passed

Through gawkers gathered at curbside

And hailed a cab for his last ride....

I'd seen your death certificate,

Signed by the famous coroner:

Who would have ever questioned it?

-Surely not anyone aware

Of your strong predilection for

The good life, served up bloody rare

Along with bottomless cocktails

And your unfiltered "coffin nails."

It was the good life did you in,

As I assumed-the appetite

Whose cheerful servant you had been

Until the good life cut yours short

One winter afternoon. That night

I listened to the wind's report

And hid myself away and cried.

I learned of dying when you died.

Other lessons were more subtle,

Were even open to debate;

This one alone brooked no rebuttal,

As though some mindless hand erased

The chalked-on figures from a slate,

And all the lines a lifetime traced

Were altogether swept away

Late on one lightless winter day...

II

My legacy from Uncle Fred?

The bookish boy whose vision you

Sought to correct inherited

Some books of yours (which some years later

Helped to explain a thing or two)

By Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater,

And two bronze candlesticks with putti

A pair, in truth, of no great beauty,

But emblematic, I still knew,

Of what were called "the finer things-"

Though what these were, I had no clue.

Your angels now present themselves

In memory to try their wings,

Fly to forgotten kitchen shelves

And point out what I'd long misplaced,

The hidden origins of taste

In every bottle, tin or jar:

Wild berries crushed to silken jam,

The bright black beads of caviar;

Rock lobster tails, imported beer,

Asparagus and Smithfield ham,

So unfamiliar and so dear!

Even a can-can it be so?

Quite plainly labeled ESCARGOTS!

Then, as you evenly divided

Delicacies unknown before,

Even the youngest was provided

With a small portion of his own

A kindness he's still grateful for,

Who sees a line distinctly drawn

From diverse canapes and torten

Through Eliot to later Auden.

III

Those afternoons of cakes and laughter

Faded to evenings that ended

With your invariant departure

For downtown, and for company

More worldly-wise than that provided

By your provincial family;

Although I kept my nose in books,

I caught the grown-ups' knowing looks.

No matter what their glances meant,

Their explanations gave you cover;

The Interfaith Impediment

To me, at least, seemed plausible:

Your fiancee (not your lover)

Was a jewish or a Catholic girl

Whose parents would not let her wed

A Protestant-our Uncle Fred.

Your long engagement having failed,

You bore with equanimity

Whatever grief its loss entailed.

That was a fiction, through and through,

I realize: it had to be;

Back then, I thought that it was true,

And even now, want, in some sense,

For it to be not just pretense--

I break off and an upraised brow

Furrows my own: "What's that you said?"

I'm really not sure that I know,

But you must-you're the Analyst.

"His nephew wanted Uncle Fred

Straight with an unacknowledged twist,

To be spared the humiliation

Of queerdom by association."

A liberal for my whole life,

I'm more than willing to believe

The very worst about myself:

Was I so timid that I'd wanted

A likely fiction to deceive

The childhood friends who would have taunted?

Of course-but that scenario

Assumes I would have had to know,

Which wasn't very likely, was it?

He died. The years went by. I guessed

What had been hidden in his closet,

The knowledge I had come so near,

The truth that could not be expressed.

It was his death that I thought queer.

I use the word in its old sense.

I think he died of the pretense.

IV

His death, recounted, soon assumed

Sufficient plausibility;

We mourned and our lives resumed.

And yet it left a residue

Behind-a need for secrecy,

The knot a child tries to undo

By tugging at-this doesn't work:

The knot just tightens with each jerk.

Familiar silence, a white noise

Made up of what cannot be said,

Affirming all that it denies;

In its refusal, volumes speak,

Are eloquent, could they be read:

To this young scholar, they were Greek,

Unfathomable on their shelves.

My life went on. It tried on selves,

Adjusting them until they fit

My aptitudes or sense of style,

And on those days I thought of it,

His death became one reason why

I ought to jog that extra mile

Or give up (on the umpteenth try)

The weed that killed him, as I thought.

Silence would seem to have won out,

Until, when almost all who knew

The secret were themselves deceased,

It was at last my mother who

One afternoon abruptly said,

"It wasn't cardiac arrest--

Somebody killed your Uncle Fred,

Beat him to death so brutally