Growing Up (19 page)

Suddenly I hated to leave that house. Suddenly I realized I had been happy there. It had been six years since my mother had brought us to Uncle Allen and Aunt Pat to live for a few months until she could set up a home of our own. Now her youth had passed without a single triumph. She was in her fortieth year.

U
NCLE
Harold was famous for lying.

He had once been shot right between the eyes. He told me so himself. It was during World War I. An underaged boy, he had run away from home, enlisted in the Marine Corps, and been shipped to France, where one of the Kaiser’s soldiers had shot him. Right between the eyes.

It was a miracle it hadn’t killed him, and I said so the evening he told me about it. He explained that Marines were so tough they didn’t need miracles. I was now approaching the age of skepticism, and though it was risky business challenging adults, I was tempted to say, “Swear on the Bible?” I did not dare go this far, but I did get a hint of doubt into my voice by repeating his words as a question.

“Right between the eyes?”

“Right between the eyes,” he said. “See this scar?”

He placed a finger on his forehead just above the bridge of his nose. “That’s all the mark it left,” he said.

“I don’t see any scar,” I said.

“It’s probably faded by now,” he said. “It’s been a long time ago.”

I said it must have hurt a good bit.

“Hurt! You bet it hurt.”

“What did you do?”

“It made me so mad I didn’t do a thing but pull out my pistol and kill that German right there on the spot.”

At this point Aunt Sister came in from the kitchen with cups of cocoa. “For God’s sake, Harold,” she said, “quit telling the boy those lies.”

People were always telling Uncle Harold for God’s sake quit telling those lies. His full name was Harold Sharp, and in the family, people said, “That Harold Sharp is the biggest liar God ever sent down the pike.”

Aunt Sister, Ida Rebecca’s only daughter, had married him shortly after my mother took Doris and me from Morrisonville. He’d spent sixteen years in the Marines by then, but at Aunt Sister’s insistence he gave up the Marine Corps and the two of them moved to Baltimore. There they had a small apartment on Hollins Street overlooking Union Square. Our place was a second-floor apartment on West Lombard Street just across the square. It was easy for my mother to stroll over to Aunt Sister’s with Doris and me to play Parcheesi or Caroms or Pick-Up-Sticks with the two of them, but the real pleasure of these visits for me came from listening to Uncle Harold.

It didn’t matter that my mother called him “the biggest liar God ever sent down the pike.” In spite of his reputation for varnishing a fact, or maybe because of the outrageousness with which he did the varnishing, I found him irresistible. It was his intuitive refusal to spoil a good story by slavish adherence to fact that enchanted me. Though poorly educated, Uncle Harold somehow knew that the possibility of creating art lies not in reporting but in fiction.

He worked at cutting grass and digging graves for a cemetery in West Baltimore. This increased the romantic aura through which I saw him, for I had become fascinated with the Gothic
aspects of death since arriving in Baltimore. In Baltimore, disposing of the dead seemed to be a major cultural activity. There were three funeral parlors within a one-block radius of our house, and a steady stream of hearses purred through the neighborhood. I had two other distant relatives from Morrisonville who had migrated to Baltimore, and both of them were also working in cemeteries. In addition, there was a fairly steady flow of corpses through our house on Lombard Street.

Our landlord there, a genial Lithuanian tailor who occupied the first floor, lent out his parlor to a young relative who was an undertaker and sometimes had an overflow at his own establishment. As a result there was often an embalmed body coffined lavishly in the first-floor parlor. Since our apartment could be reached only by passing the landlord’s parlor, and since its double doors were always wide open, it seemed to me that instead of finding a home of our own, we had come to rest in a funeral home. Passing in and out of the house, I tried to avert my eyes from the garishly rouged bodies and hold my breath against inhaling the cloying odors of candle wax, tuberoses, and embalming fluid which suffused the hallway.

When Uncle Harold came over for an evening of card playing and found a corpse in the parlor, his imagination came alive. On one such evening I went down to let Aunt Sister and him in the front door. Noting the coffin in our landlord’s parlor, Uncle Harold paused, strode into the room, nodded at the mourners, and examined the deceased stranger with professional scrutiny. Upstairs afterwards, playing cards at the dining-room table, Uncle Harold announced that the old gentleman in the coffin downstairs did not look dead to him.

“I could swear I saw one of his eyelids flicker,” he said.

Nobody paid him any attention.

“You can’t always be sure they’re dead,” he said.

Nobody was interested except me.

“A man I knew was almost buried alive once,” he said.

“Are you going to play the jack or hold it all night?” my mother asked.

“It was during the war,” Uncle Harold said. “In France. They were closing the coffin on him when I saw him blink one eye.”

The cards passed silently and were shuffled.

“I came close to being buried alive myself one time,” he said.

“For God’s sake, Harold, quit telling those lies,” Aunt Sister said.

“It’s the truth, just as sure as I’m sitting here, so help me God,” said Uncle Harold. “It happens every day. We dig them up out at the cemetery—to do autopsies, you know—and you can see they fought like the devil to get out after the coffin was closed on them, but it’s too late by that time.”

Uncle Harold was not a tall man, but the Marines had taught him to carry himself with a swaggering erect indolence and to measure people with the grave, cool arrogance of authority. Though he now shoveled dirt for a living, he was always immaculately manicured by the time he sat down to supper. In this polished man of the world—suits pressed to razor sharpness, every hair in place, eyes of icy gray self-confidence—I began to detect a hidden boy, in spirit not too different from myself, though with a love for mischief which had been subdued in me by too much melancholy striving to satisfy my mother’s notions of manhood.

Admiring him so extravagantly, I was disappointed to find that he detested my hero, Franklin Roosevelt. In Uncle Harold’s view, Roosevelt was a deep-dyed villain of the vilest sort. He had data about Roosevelt’s shenanigans which newspapers were afraid to publish and occasionally entertained with hair-raising accounts of Rooseveltian deeds that had disgraced the Presidency.

“You know, I suppose, that Roosevelt only took the job for the money,” he told me one evening.

“Does it pay a lot?”

“Not all that much,” he said, “but there are plenty of ways of getting rich once you get in the White House, and Roosevelt’s using all of them.”

“How?”

“He collects money from everybody who wants to get in to see him.”

“People have to give him money before he’ll talk to them?”

“They don’t give him the money face to face. He’s too smart for that,” Uncle Harold said.

“Then how does he get it?”

“There’s a coat rack right outside his door, and he keeps an overcoat hanging on that rack. Before anybody can get in to see him, they’ve got to put money in the overcoat pocket.”

I was shocked, which pleased Uncle Harold. “That’s the kind of President you’ve got,” he said.

“Do you know that for sure?”

“Everybody knows it.”

“How do
you
know it?”

“A fellow who works at the White House told me how it’s done.”

This was such powerful stuff that as soon as I got home I passed it on to my mother. “Who told you that stuff?” she asked.

“Uncle Harold.”

She laughed at my gullibility. “Harold Sharp is the biggest liar God ever sent down the pike,” she said. “He doesn’t know any more about Roosevelt than a hog knows about holiday.”

Through Uncle Harold I first heard of H. L. Mencken. Mencken’s house lay just two doors from Uncle Harold’s place on Hollins Street. Uncle Harold pointed it out to me one day when we were walking around to the Arundel Ice Cream store for a treat. “You know who lives in that house, don’t you?”

Of course I didn’t.

“H. L. Mencken.”

Who’s H. L. Mencken?

“You mean to tell me you never heard of H. L. Mencken? He writes those pieces in the newspaper that make everybody mad,” Uncle Harold said.

I understood from Uncle Harold’s respectful tone that Mencken must be a great man, though Mencken’s house did not look like the house of a great man. It looked very much like every other house in Baltimore. Red brick, white marble steps. “I saw
Mencken coming out of his house just the other day,” Uncle Harold said.

It’s doubtful Uncle Harold had ever read anything by Mencken. Uncle Harold’s tastes ran to
Doc Savage
and
The Shadow
. Still, I could see he was proud of living so close to such a great man. It was a measure of how well he had done in life at a time when millions of other men had been broken by the Depression.

He had left home in 1917 for the Marines, an uneducated fifteen-year-old country boy from Taylorstown, a village not far from Morrisonville, just enough schooling to read and do arithmetic, not much to look forward to but a career of farm labor. Maybe in the Marines he even became a hero. He did fight in France and afterwards stayed on in the Marines, shipping around the Caribbean under General Smedley Butler to keep Central America subdued while Yankee corporations pumped out its wealth. For a man with negligible expectations, he had not done badly by 1937 standards. Full-time cemetery labor; a one-bedroom apartment so close to a famous writer.

My first awe of him had softened as I gradually realized his information was not really intended to be information. Gradually I came to see that Uncle Harold was not a liar but a teller of stories and a romantic, and it was Uncle Harold the teller of tales who fascinated me. Though he remained a stern figure, and I never considered sassing him, I saw now that he knew I no longer received his stories with total credulity, but that I was now listening for the pleasure of watching his imagination at play. This change in our relationship seemed to please him.

Over the Parcheesi board one evening he told a story about watching the dead in Haiti get up out of their shrouds and dance the Charleston. Aunt Sister and my mother had the usual response: “For God’s sake, Harold, quit telling those lies.”

His face was impassive as always when he issued the usual protest—“It’s the truth, so help me God”—but I could see with absolute clarity that underneath the impassive mask he was smiling. He saw me studying him, scowled forbiddingly at me for one moment, then winked. That night we came to a silent understanding:
We were two romancers whose desire for something more fanciful than the humdrum of southwest Baltimore was beyond the grasp of unimaginative people like Aunt Sister and my mother.

Still, it took me a while to understand what he was up to. He wanted life to be more interesting than it was, but his only gift for making it so lay in a small talent for homespun fictions, and he could not resist trying to make the most of it. Well, there was nothing tragic about his case. Our world in Baltimore hadn’t much respect for the poetic impulse. In our world a man spinning a romance was doomed to be dismissed as nothing more than a prodigious liar.

It was common for the poorest household to contain a large dictionary, for conversation was a popular Depression pastime and Americans were passionately interested in words. Uncle Harold consulted his dictionary regularly looking for jaw-breaker vocabulary to give his tales more weight. One evening when my mother was there he made the mistake, when she spilled her cocoa, of saying that the spilled cocoa was “super-flu-us.” Always the schoolmarm when it came to words, my mother chided him for ignorance. The word “superfluous,” she pointed out, was ridiculously misused when talking about fluid on the tablecloth and, in any case, was not pronounced “super-flu-us.”

Uncle Harold was often subjected to these small humiliations and accepted them without anger or sulkiness, at least when they came from women. Ungallant behavior toward a woman was not in his nature. This probably accounted for the happiness of his marriage, because Aunt Sister had inherited Ida Rebecca’s disposition to be a commander of men. Like her mother, Aunt Sister was tall, angular, tart, and forceful. Uncle Harold may have been the Marine by profession, but Aunt Sister was born and bred to be commandant of the household corps.

She had no patience for what she called Uncle Harold’s “foolishness”: his love of fiction, his habit of giving her romantic presents like filmy nightgowns and Evening in Paris perfume. She stored the cosmetics in a closet for use on special occasions which never arose and folded the lingerie away in chests where it lay
forgotten. “Aunt Sister is too practical sometimes,” said my mother, who thought Uncle Harold “a good man” despite his frailties, and therefore a man who deserved more indulgence than Aunt Sister granted him.