This morning on my way into work, I thought to myself, Uncle Mark and Uncle Bill are gone. Just like that. It was the strangest feeling, the queerest sense of something tilted on its axis in the cosmos. Three hours later, my sister sent me an obit she had read in her paper.
Uncle Mark was gone. He died of complications from a stroke last Thursday.
I called to tell Dad. Silence on the other end for 45 seconds. Then he said slowly, "Can you please call Anne for me so I can talk to her?" I called Mark's widow and conferenced them.
Uncle Mark wasn't an uncle by blood
-- but in some ways, so much closer to us than some people who share
our DNA. He was one of Dad's closest friends, from long ago days. I
wrote about him once: Last Call. Conversation over lobster.
Uncle Mark was Santa Claus to us. You see, after we emigrated to the States, he and his family opened up their home and their holidays to us. We spent Christmas Day with them, every year for the first five years we lived in the States. He was my first Santa Claus -- our first trees were trimmed and admired at his home. We owned toys he had given us for years -- somewhere my brother still has a teddy bear that Mark gave him. We would spend summer days lazing at his pool. It wasn't until years later, when we were older, that we appreciated the man in all his vitality, all his history, all his marvel. I was telling Greg about him today and I felt as though I were glowing inside, recounting Uncle Mark stories. He was recruited into Dame Myra Hess' spy network when he was a young man bicycling through Europe during the Nazi incursion; he was an honorary member of the OSS and joined the CIA shortly after its founding; he had been to nine consecutive Olympic Games. I think he saw Jesse Owens; I know he was there for the Munich massacre. He was married to a woman whom he adored, whom he called Annie, to whom he would speak Italian. He played piano beautifully. One night, at his house, he sat before his piano and began playing Rachmaninoff; then paused and said emotionally, "Too many memories. Too many memories." I always wondered what was in that piece that elicited such feeling and passion and sadness from him. He showed me pictures from albums of his wife and he on their travels --her grandfather was a French aristocrat and there were pictures of the chateau in which she had spent time as a child. He showed me a tea set that had been in her family. "Paul Revere made it," he said off-handedly one night. He had a big, booming voice, a tenor voice tinged with an odd amalgamation of his California roots and a decidedly Northeastern inflection. It was a unique accent. He had a bushy brown mustache that never changed in all the years we knew him. He went to school at Berkeley but was careful to note, "Before it went insane." HIs hugs will be missed.
After Dad and Anne had an opportunity to speak privately, I got back on the line and said, "Anne, I want you to know how much we loved Uncle Mark."
And she said, "Oh Kiki, he loved you all so much."
When our parents moved to Florida last year, they didn't manage to update everyone in their address book. So after this shock, I called some of their old friends to allow Dad an opportunity to talk to them. It occurred to me to call Uncle Bill and Aunt Pat, two more family friends who are infinitely dear to Dad and to us. After I connected with Aunt Pat, she gently said, "Kiki, I must tell you something: your Uncle Bill has passed away."
And I sat, dumbfounded. Of course I knew that both Mark and Bill had gotten up there in years but I thought them immortal. They had been in my life so long, not just names, but people who made their mark on us, who shaped and crafted the people we became by virtue of their influences in my father's life. Uncle Bill saved my Dad's life. Uncle Bill got my father out of Vietnam as the country was tumbling all around. Uncle Bill, while not the fixture that Uncle Mark had been, was nevertheless a force in my life. My life -- all of it, I lay at his feet -- because he gave me my dad. You see? He saved my dad so that I had a dad.
I had an opportunity a few years ago, to know Uncle Bill and Aunt Pat as an adult. I stayed at their home in Boulder, the back yard which butts up to a staggering mountain. Aunt Pat made a dinner of roast turkey for us. It was an extraordinary evening of conversation. When I read Henry IV, Part I now, when I hear it being read, when I see it performed, I remember that night with Uncle Bill -- he asked me, "What is your favorite play?" and I told him, "Henry IV, Part I," and he exclaimed, "Oh that play! That play! It is perfectly balanced -- the world of the sun and the world of the moon!" He took me to his library and we pulled out a heavily annotated collection of Shakespeare -- and flipping through to the play, he pointed all the elements of the sun, the moon, and the stars.
"How does a lit major at Yale become a counterintelligence officer?" I asked him.
"Well," he said, drawing on his pipe. "Analyzing a case isn't that much different than analyzing a poem."
He was weathered and handsome, infinitely elegant and warm.
"Do you read Nabokov?" he asked.
"I haven't."
He sighed, delirious with delight. "You must. You must read Nabokov. Begin with The Secret Life of Sebastian Knight."
I so wanted Hubby to meet him. I think he would have been delighted to know that my and Hubby's first conversation centered on Pale Fire over a chess game.
Years ago, I was reading a favorite book of essays, "Ex Libris," by Anne Fadiman. She writes about an episode in which she learns that a friend of her father's had died. Her father, an extraordinary man of letters -- Clifton Fadiman -- had by then become blind. So Anne had to read to him his friend's obituary. The essay struck two primary chords with me: the first was the fact that her father's friend was Francis Steegmuller, a biographer and historian whom I admired, and who I did not know had died until I read her essay. And the second was the image of Anne on the phone with her father, required to read to him the details of his friend's death in what should have been a solitary exercise for him. I can't help thinking of that experience now, having had to, twice in one day, tell my father the details of should have been his own private experience.
I think of what my grandmother once said to me when she reflected on the passing of her friends: "The landscape of an long-lived person -- it is very sad."
It's sad too, to be left by such people.
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