They watched me. No one there, including myself, had loved my uncle; I knew this as if it had been a fact of nature. And we had been as supernumerary to him as he had been to us. It came to me that the major relationship between people was a kind of reciprocal indifference. It was comforting. I realized that no one ever had much to lose. Strangely moved, I began to speak.
“My uncle and I didn’t understand each other,” I said. “He’d be surprised to know that I am delivering his eulogy. We always postponed as long as we could answering each other’s letters.”
They looked at me stonily, but having that audience gave me a strange confidence. I might have been addressing a ship’s company, or men before battle. I had a sense of heightened opportunity; it was now only a question of finding out what I needed to say.
“Well, what can I say about him?” I asked seriously. “He had very few friends,” I began. “Truthfully, I don’t think I recognize more than two or three of you., You couldn’t have been close to him — I wasn’t close to him myself. Yet he’s dead and we must all have felt something because we’re all here to watch his funeral. Well, I feel something. I do. Jesus, I really feel something right now.
“We didn’t get along. Finally I had to leave his house.
“Some of you probably knew him better than I did.
“I remember one thing. He belonged to a lot of clubs. Now maybe you think that was a defense against his loneliness, but I don’t think so. He took pleasure… Look, this is a little ridiculous, I hardly knew the man—” Suddenly I felt myself coming close to my theme. I had broken off to address the minister, warning him. He smiled and waited for me to go on. It was out of both our hands now.
“Well, he seemed to get pleasure out of certain things even if he couldn’t have them himself. It was okay with him just as long as somebody had them, just as long as they existed to be had. I don’t understand that.”
I looked again at the minister and he was still smiling. Even if he weren’t, it was too late; he’d had his chance. Now the power was on me. Hallelujah! I turned back to the small crowd around the grave.
“He lived a lousy life. His life was shit. Let’s understand that. But he made allowances and he had his defenses, his way of dealing with it. He should have been on the other side. He was sick, even when he was a young man. He had the shakes. He stuttered. He was always poor. He should have been on the other side! His resentments should have been against the well and the strong and the rich. But they weren’t — they never were. My uncle thought like a banker. His sympathies were all with influence, with prestige, and he hated men of hard luck as though they had sinned against God, as though misery were illegal.
“Jesus, he was a snob! I went to a class breakfast once, given by one of the rich girls in my high school. She lived on an estate. She was very rich. There were footmen, butlers. My uncle never tired of hearing abut it, of having me tell about it. He was proud that some people still lived like that. He was proud of me for being so clever as to be invited there. It was crazy…
“Well, it was a comical thing, to live like that, in the ballrooms of the mind. In the heart’s formal gardens…
“He took taxis. Sometimes he’d have the driver drop him off in front of some bank downtown. He didn’t even have an account there. You know?
“But you know what was wrong with my uncle? He was a coward. All of that respectable crap, that was just fear. He didn’t even have a dream — he had an outline for a dream. And all the things he did, all the notions he had, they didn’t help at all. He was the sort of Peeping Tom that Power needs to have outside its windows. But what the hell, he’s inside his box now. See him? So what he was a snob? I write it off. I forgive him. His death takes care of that. He just didn’t go far enough.” I pointed to the coffin. “Ah, sap! Ah, jerk! CORPSE!”
The minister cleared his throat as though he meant to interfere, but I raised my hand, silencing him. When I had started I had been speaking haltingly. Now the words poured out; I said them without having to think about them. Something was clear.
“Some of you may know about me. About my lousy life. Anyway, that’s the way my uncle would tell it. I’m on the make for the great. Well, you know something? He was crazy not to understand that. We were on the same side. We were on the same goddamn side. He should have had my anger!” I was crying.
Something was clear. I wanted to wail, to let it out, to moan and scream, to stand there and never leave, to hold this moment of my clear, strident grief, to make it my life, grow old with it and die when it began to wane. I felt a deep relief. It was like the climax of some fierce and mounting anger, when for a moment one is freed of all thought of consequence, when for a fraction of a second one is the equal of the world and the will soars like a bird in some passionate whirling flight. It was a moment of hard and infinite ruthlessness, of triumph, in which any end at all was justified by any means at all. I floated deliriously buoyant in a sea of self, with some blank check of forgiveness, forever beyond guilt or crime or folly or reality, having all future like a gift, like a prince, all choice underwritten.
Suddenly men, intruders, were holding my arms and pulling me away from my uncle’s grave.
Something has happened. Something is clear. People do not change. I am no believer in epiphanies. What we are is what we come to. Lear dies passionate still. We are stuck with ourselves. Rehabilitation is when you move to a new neighborhood, but some furniture travels always with us, the familiar old sofa of self, the will’s ancient wardrobe, the old old knives and spoons of the personality. Yet something has happened.
Just when I was breaking through! Recently I have had successes. Such successes! Last week I had lunch with Ezra Pound at St. Albans and with Jackson Pollack in New York. Two weeks ago I was in Albany at the governor’s mansion. There have been invitations. Gams. Something is clear, something has happened. Uncle Myles has raised me. He raises me. I learn from death. Grist. Grist and Truth.
To hell with successes. Something is clear. Something has happened. Something is changed. They’re not enough! I have let the great off too easily. Dinners, conversations, two hours in a bar — what is that? What am I, my uncle the corpse? I have let them off too easily. They have taken me into their parlors instead of their lives.
Something has happened. Something has changed. Something is clear.
In Lazaar’s apartment — on the desk, on the piano, on the coffee and end tables, on every surface — there are picture frames from the dime stores. Inside, behind the glass, the figures lean away from the eye, angled to the upright world like any other shadows. The thin tins of the frames are gold or silver; each has the integrity of its cheapness, like some product of our youth freshly seen. I look at one, a somewhat larger frame with wide, mirrored margins down which run extravagant, impossible flowers, lush, red, fantastic as a beanstalk in a fairy story. The pictures are of movie stars in pale, colored tints which resemble the hand-tinting of those years before color photography. The lips are pungent with pastel blood, the skin a kind of grayish pink, like the skins of people with heart disease. The faces are familiar, of course, but strike me somehow as preposterous. Suddenly I understand why. There are Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, William Powell, Deanna Durbin, Wallace Beery and Humphrey Bogart as they appeared twenty years ago. Paul Muni is a young man. Beneath each photograph is a stamped signature, a flamboyant, meaningless greeting: “Best Wishes from Hollywood, Robert Taylor”; “Musically Yours, Deanna Durbin.” I am oddly moved by the pictures. They might be pictures of things. I ask Lazaar about it.