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.
Uncle Willie was always being kicked out of schools. Gramp said he must have a hard, horny growth on the back of his neck from so much sliding from the dean's office to the railroad station on his ear.
I remember the first time Uncle Willie was kicked out of Harvard. (It was a small mailer of smearing the history prof's wife's best Waldmanhund with mustard, and shipping him between the halves of a loaf of French bread to the football coach, then on a team trip to the wilds of Maryland.)
At such times, Uncle Willie always tried to come home after Gramp was in bed. Unless Gramp was having an affair with a ballet dancer or promising to send a young waitress to Rome to study singing, Uncle Willie could break in through the garden house tacked on behind the laundry room… and come down to breakfast the next morning, hands in pockets, vest pins all polished, and his hair in its balloon of lard.
Thai morning, when Uncle Willie had left Harvard's fencing learn to face some dog-college butchers from Ohio without him, he came down as usual and smiled at Aunt Fiona, who didn't like him.
“So!” said Aunt Fiona, running the flesh of her nose into wrinkles, as if the plumber were in the house again to see about the drains.
“On my ear,” said Uncle Willie, sitting down and hold- ing his head. “Am I overhung!”
“Where?” I asked, drinking my milk while holding my breath, so I would burp after every gulp just the way the Chinese did… or so Gramp claimed.
Uncle Willie looked at me. He was not fond of children, but he played up to me because Gramp could always be reached through me; and I was as honest as any politico.
“Morning, Stevie… the old bear up yet?”
Gramp came down the stairs just behind that remark. He looked at Uncle Willie as if he were wondering why people ever married. “Yes, I'm up… I don't bed down for the winter until January.”
“Good coffee,” said Uncle Willie.
“Home again?”
“I smashed the Bear Cat”
Gramp looked down at two eggs as if he expected them to pull a knife on him.…
Uncle Willie got up from the table and found Mama in the hall (she had just pulled me out of the dining room for feeding strawberry jam to my pet frog, Nero).
“What shall I do, Sara?” asked Uncle Willie.
Mama held me by one ear, and Nero by one leg. We both stopped wriggling to hear her answer. She said, “You mean there is more to it than just smashing the car?”
“I fear so.”
“Oh, dear,” said Mama, dropping Nero down the heating unit grill set in the floor. (Lucky the heat was off. I got him out three days later wearing a lace shawl knitted for him by friendly spiders.) “Oh, dear, Willie, you are in trouble.”
“Shall I go back and tell him more?”
“Well.…”
“Or shall I get a job on a cattle boat and go to England?” Uncle Willie was always going to get on a cattle boat.
I said, “May I have my ear back?”
Mama let go my ear. “Willie,” she said, “you face this out. You're a grown man.…”
“Of course.”
“Tell him everything.”
“Everything?” said Uncle Willie.
“Yes.”
“Well,” said Uncle Willie, squaring his well-padded shoulders, “thank you, Sara… I can always turn to you as a friend. You're right… I'm a man now.”
“Just tell him everything… one man to another.” I said. “Go in there and pitch, Uncle Willie.”
He nodded, swallowed a sad smile, and went back to the table.
Gramp was about to begin on Peaches Longstreet in Brandy, a dish he tried to have every morning (after the doctor told him to stop having Bourbon with his breakfast).
If you have brandy and some peaches, and care to make the item, here is Gramp's secret. Take a quart of strawberry vinegar, four sticks of cinnamon, two pounds of sugar, two ounces of cleaned cloves. Boil for five minutes, and add ten pounds of peaches—the big yellow ones. Be sure they are peeled with care, but leave the pits in (“The pit,” Gramp always said, “it's the bone the musclemeat of the fruit grows around, and it's full of flavor”).
Cook the peaches with care, then drain off the syrup and boil it until it is almost as thick as rice pudding. Now find a pint of your best brandy, pour it in, and stir well. Put the peaches in hot jars, pour in the brandy sauce, and seal tight.
Gramp was always in good humor over his morning peaches. It was the moment for any attack, any plan that was to be brought to him. We all valued such moments. Mama knew they could not be wasted on silly things.
Mama and I waited in the hall. It was like a scene from a bad play.
Uncle Willie said, “Have we a good lawyer?”
“There are no good lawyers… ours is a fine crook. He'll hide any body you have done in,” said Gramp.
“The girl in the car, she said something about being ruined for life.”
Gramp grinned. “Time you settled down.”
“It's her back… we ran into a milk truck on the Boston Post Road, and smashed the bottle… I mean… it was very dark and she's only a small girl and… oh hell… you've got to help me. She is going to sue me for fifty- thousand dollars.”
Gramp pushed away his plate and attacked a ham steak with gusty relish.
Aunt Fiona, who was getting older, so that she looked like a woman of forty who was always mistaken for thirty-four, sniffed and said, “Why don't you put him into The Firm? Start from the bottom and make something of himself, work his way up.”
Gramp, who had five sons who ran The Firm under his barked telephone orders to Wall Street, shook his head. “Can't do it… the country is going to hell in a hack fast enough as it is.”
Uncle Willie held his head again and said, “I've been invited to Jud's place in the Carolinas for a few weeks. Or Palm Beach… there is a girl, and…”
“There always is,” said Gramp. “Hell, you take too much after me, and that's no good at your age. Not a cent, not a beer check in credit, and no repairing of that gasoline monster. Take your raccoon skins and go!”
Uncle Willie had a sense of humor. “It should be snowing a blizzard outdoors when you say that. All right. Then I'll sell bonds.”
In those days a Harvard man could do two things and still be respected at Hasty Pudding. Decide to write a novel or sell bonds. It is amazing to remember a time that no one bought a bond if he respected his social standing, unless there was a Harvard man on the other end of it.
Uncle Willie became a bond salesman. He did very well. Everybody knew everyone was going to get rich, those days, and Uncle Willie had manners, a taste in wines, good looks, and a way on the dance floor.
Uncle Willie went through the Twenties in his English Burberrys of dark blue cloth (he had given me the raccoon as something towards my future college education), his blue-tinted shirts, his black pearl studs, his Packard job in bold blue with gold fittings (a pig farmer bought the Bear Cat to cart swill to his sty). And Uncle Willie's shoes were the darkest, with the most narrow toes, and were made for him by a famous old English bootmaker named Rabbinowitz, who had moved from Warsaw to Canal Street.
Uncle Willie had a flat of his own. I used to go there to deliver the mail that forgotten ladies used to send to his old address, It was on Murray Hill, in an old, white, marble-fronted house built by Stanford White just before he made the front page by stopping something sent at him by Harry Thaw.
I used to walk up, up a red flight of stairs smelling of Chanel's Five and the bindings of George Moore's novels that Uncle Willie collected. The white door, set in a Chinese red frame, held a small card with heavy raised lettering on it (I used to run my fingers over it, just for the hell of it) WILLIAM A. LONGSTREET.
Inside the woodwork a tired bell would loss out a tone, and all the restless mice would wake up, or stop their love- making in the walls, and run through the old paneling.
The door would be opened by a stiff Russian who had once been in livery in London, and who was called River. He was very stiff, with a bald pate and red-grey hair growing around his cars. He was the model of the first Peter Arno drawing I ever saw. River (“Not Rivers… thank you,” he would always say) was a silent man who took care of Uncle Willie, cooked his meals, stole a modest sum on the wine bill, as was expected, and was very popular with Uncle Willie's friends, who always tried to kidnap him by offering him double what he was getting from Uncle Willie… but as River said, “It's no dice” (he had become very fond of gangster motion pictures).
River would let me in and I would hand over the mail, and River would mix a hot chocolate (with a small brandy, of the best, for himself), and I would spend an hour or so inspecting Uncle Willie's rooms.
They smelled of delightful ladies I never saw, old books 1 never read, and good pictures that have now disappeared into private private collections. Uncle Willie had a fine Chardin of a girl spinning a top, a snail naked Renoir, two Daumier drawings, and a huge blue Picasso of two blue women and a wine bottle and a mad banjo dissolving into one another.
River could cook sudden dishes, those things that had to be made fast, when Uncle Willie came in suddenly with five or six people, all as hungry as literary critics after a kill.
His special dish was Eggs for the Tsar. I finished the remains of it often in the kitchen, while Uncle Willie was tearing James Cabell or Ben Hecht limb from limb in the parlor (I mean their books, of course). Uncle Willie only invited writers in the flesh when he fell they needed a loan of money or fresh linen. He didn't care for successful writers.
“They have lost the humble touch that makes for great stuff,” he would say. “More Eggs for the Tsar, River.”
River cooked the dish with speed and skill. In a bowl he would heal half-a-cup of olive oil (“In Russia, of course, da, trogai, trogai, I would use sunflower oil,” said River) with a cup of tomato sauce seasoned with a few drops of his holiest Tabasco sauce. When the sauce began to sing and bubble, he would add ten eggs, breaking them in without spoiling one yolk. He would cook the whole slowly, and just when he fell it was at the proper pitch, he would sweep me aside, shouting, “Kak vashe zdorov'e?—how is your health?” And I would answer back, picking up the toast, “Kak maslo korov'e!—fine as cow's butler!” And he would pour a pint of beer over the eggs, and pop the eggs on the toast to serve.
Then he would look at me, and I would nod.
“Krasivy!—beautiful!”
Yes, Uncle Willie's place had a lot of charm. And a lot of stuff no one dared call chic. Uncle Willie hated that word. “It's like dressing a bum in perfumed rags.…”
Mama had helped Uncle Willie furnish the flat. It was the kind of place she should have wanted, she said, if she were the kind of man Uncle Willie was.
There was a little shop kept by a friend of Gramp's called Cockney Charlie… and Mama and I and Uncle Willie, when American Can common stood high, we went to Cockney Charlie's to help Uncle Willie furnish his flat.
Charlie, as usual, was drinking ale, and combing a sheepdog mustache with his square fingers.
“You say special stuff, but as the lidy says, it ‘as to he solid.…”
“That's right,” said Mama. “No Regency made in Grand Rapids.”
“Right.” winked Charlie. “Mine is mide in Hitaly… I say hit as shouldn't.”
Mama and Uncle Willie had a picnic… every worm hole was admired so much Charlie asked them to speak low… “or the bloomin' worm will tike it into ‘is ‘ead to come out for a bow.…”
At the end of the week the flat was furnished. Mama sighed and looked around her. “It's wonderful, Willie.”
“You will come to the housewarming?”
“Oh, no,” said Mama. “This place isn't for me after today. It looks wicked and sinful… like something out of French novelists.”
Mama and Uncle Willie looked at each other, understanding each other… and Mama never went there anymore. But she was proud of his place.