Photo by Yasamine June on Unsplash
Uncle Alfred spoke in quips and quotes from movies. Six feet, five inches tall, taller than any member of the extended family, he feigned needing to duck through the front door. It was how he announced himself. A calling card of sorts long after people stopped carrying them and handing them out. Everything about Uncle Alfred had been salvaged from previous decades. His still-black hair was slicked with Vitalis. His three-piece suits screamed bold plaids from the ‘70s. He wore platform shoes and stroked a handlebar mustache. It was like several periods of fashion had been in a high-speed car accident. Some survived, others didn’t. Those that did clung to Alfred like tracks made on a muddy road. He was imprinted and he believed it made him interesting, fashionable. Debonair, he might say.
Uncle Alfred was always just getting out of a relationship with Velma or Verna, Agnes or Dorothy. All had equally old-fashioned names. We never met a one. At family gatherings they always had to be with their own families. But no one could imagine that Uncle Alfred, with his Buddy-Hackett-meets-circus-barker demeanor, could actually attract, much less hang on to, a real live girlfriend.
Holidays were the worst. Thanksgiving was the worst of the worst.
“I’ll be back,” he would growl in a half-there Schwarzenegger accent as he hoisted himself up from the table and lumbered towards the bathroom.
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” he’d bellow when the gravy tureen was passed. Then he’d drown everything on his plate until it looked like a California mudslide.
When the golden, glazed turkey was placed in front of my father, the resident carver, Uncle Alfred would say, “It’s alive, it’s alive.” Then again and louder, “It’s alive, it’s alive,” if the turkey appeared to slide on the decorative platter. When the resident dog—we always had one, a mutt of some size and unknown origin—saw slabs of turkey and began to beg, Uncle Alfred would lean down into his mangy face. “Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy? Or are you gonna bite.”
Nervous laughter got passed around with the Parker House rolls. Most of us at the table wouldn’t have known the movie sources, but we knew that Uncle Alfred’s patter, like his clothes and hair style, were borrowed affectations. Nothing was genuinely his. He was a pastiche, an imitation of a man being a man.
When conversations turned political, which they sometimes did, and Uncle Alfred disagreed with a more conservative relative, he’d get red in the face, stand up, pushing the table a bit with his belly and toss out, “You can’t handle the truth.” No one replied, not even the target of his borrowed barb. Heads bent in unison, as if in prayer, over turkey, carrots, and buttered peas.
“The stuff that dreams are made of,” he started saying, always in the same whimsical, sing-song voice, when the teenaged girls began to gush about college adventures, dream careers beyond.
One thing Uncle Alfred never was was creepy. No standing too close, hugging too long. Hands never drifted, accidentally, to any 16-year-old’s bottom. Uncle Alfred was a gentleman, albeit an odd, Picasso-pieced and, probably, lonely one.
Years into our Thanksgiving gatherings and our dutiful tolerating of Uncle Alfred, we began to notice a change, a kind of softening. He said less, spouted less nonsense, moved more slowly to the bathroom. “You’ve got to ask yourself one question,” he said one wintery holiday. “Do I feel lucky? I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
One week later, Uncle Alfred left this earth. Phone calls traveled through the family like wild fire but no one really knew what to say. Years of putting up with his irritating quips had stunned us into surprising wordlessness. We all felt he deserved more words, but we simply couldn’t corral them. He had, after all, given us so many over the years. Where were ours?
He was waked in his boldest plaid suit—maroon, yolk-yellow and navy. The undertaker had combed his hair into a sort of pomp, waxed his mustache. Somehow his eyes seemed bluer than blue, like Paul Newman’s in The Absence of Malice.
A finalist in the Elyse Wolf Prize, Jane Poirier Hart holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and was named Poetry Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston. Her work has appeared in print and online journals, including Los Angeles Review, The Southern Poetry Review, The Worcester Review, The Ocean State Review, The Plath Poetry Project and MER Vox Folio.