Of all Papa's many brothers, the one Mama liked the best was my Uncle Willie. She said he lived as carefree as if he knew tomorrow he expected a very pleasant death… “One of those sweet partings, all roses and poems…” Mama used to say.
“Now. Sara.” Papa said when she said that. “Willie is just a butterfly….”
“He's the only real gentleman among you all.”
“Gramp is a gentleman.”
“Yes… but he holds a horse pistol to your head when he calls himself a gentleman, and dares you to say he isn't.”
Papa sighed. “I could have been like Willie… and you wouldn't have liked it at all.”
Mama looked at me again, and I went up to bed. I suppose the talk about my Uncle Willie went on… because Papa slept in the living room on the sofa that night. The next day Mama called him “Mr. L.”… which was a sure sign. he used to tell me. “Stevie, when I'm Mr. L., I'm in the kennels.”
Papa didn't stay in the doghouse long. He sent Uncle Willie a check and had Mama write him a sweet letter. I could understand my Uncle Willie because Mama was a romantic, too.…
With the passing of my Uncle Willie will go the last of the F. Scott Fitzgerald heroes on this earth. Uncle Willie is the last hold-out, the last living member of those people who were once pointed out as being “right out of This Side of Paradise or The Great Gatsby.” The truth is that my Uncle Willie was not a Princeton man at all. He went to Harvard, he said, because the Princeton orange was not at all a color for neckties, as compared with the Harvard crimson.
My Uncle Willie became a member of the Fitzgerald mob in officers' training school in 1917. He shared a tent, a smoking stove, and a copy of Proust's first volume with F. Scott. Uncle Willie was also a hell of a fine speller, and he would spell the hard words for the young writer. In fact, in our family we think the spelling in This Side of Paradise is better than the prose; but that's simply because it's the only book Uncle Willie ever wrote. It stands between my first novel and a copy of Cramp's cook book (“privately printed, with the type broken up and served with aspic and moss jelly,” Gramp used to say, to collectors of first editions).
Uncle Willie was six feet tall, very lean, with blonde-brown hair… which he wore under a coat of grease in the tight, shiny ball made famous by the John Held, Jr., drawings of the period. He was very handsome, we all thought… but Gramp said he looked like Lord Byron ten years dead (since then, Gramp's remark has been tailored by gag writers to fit other men).
Uncle Willie never walked when he could get a cab… and never took a cab when he could talk the family into repairing his Stutz Bear Cat with the red wheels. Uncle Willie had an auto wreck a week, but in those days they made cars to last and they didn't change the model every year. Uncle Willie's Bear Cat was low, and when he took a girl to a game in it, they would both lie on their backs on the floor boards, wrapped in furs, with their school colors whipping in the breeze through the windshield.…
There were no heaters in cars then, and Uncle Willie invented the “Stutz Stove” for car travel. It was a silver hip flask filled with a new cut gin as fragrant as subway air. He and his girl of the moment (they were all legs in those days, shingled flat haircuts, tube hats on which our modern army modeled the soldier's tin head-pot, and a tube skirt that removed breasts, hips, and stomach)… he and his lady would suck the hip flask and groan at how good it was not. and hope they would not go blind before they saw the Harvard team on the five-yard line.
Uncle Willie wore heavy sweaters and striped shirts, and loose oilskins in wet weather (but no lettering or humor marked on them; that was for mid-western frumps and freshmen from Rutgers). His suits were either too tight or too loose. And, if belted, they were belled, but in spades. His high school and prep frat pins, his society and honor pins, were on a line across his stomach, and set with jewels and chains.
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