My Brother Louis Measures Worms (10 page)

We never got very good grades on these papers because there was so little to tell, but we did share the glory when Vergil won a blue ribbon in the YMCA Pet Show. He won it for “Unusual Obedience to Command”—we commanded him to “play dead,” and no dog did it better or for so long.

Misplaced Persons

M
other was not the only
member of her family to be intimidated by automobiles, just as Aunt Mildred was not the only one to have exactly opposite feelings. In fact, they all seemed to be either one way or the other, with the exception of my little brother Louis, who enjoyed driving a car (till he was found out and stopped), but did so without risk to anyone's life or limbs.

The extreme cases were Aunt Mildred, with whom Louis and I were forbidden to ride—and, at the other end of the scale, Aunt Blanche. My father said that with Aunt Mildred we were apt to be killed outright, but with Aunt Blanche we would probably die of old age while waiting to turn left at an intersection.

When, on one occasion, circumstances required him to be her passenger, he said that he saw parts of town previously unknown to him as she drove blocks and blocks out of her way to avoid crossing traffic.

“I would tell her, ‘You can turn here, Blanche,'” he said, “but she would never do it. We would go on three or four streets, turn right, turn right, turn right again. We were trying to get to the bank, and you could
see
the bank, but it might as well have been on the other side of a river. . . . Never again!”

Aunt Blanche's travels were further complicated by her poor sense of direction (a failing she shared with my mother), and by her insistence on beginning any trip, long or short, at the post office. Since she didn't live very far from the post office, it wasn't unusual for her to drive past it often, in the natural course of events . . . but even if she was headed for the other end of town in the opposite direction she still drove first to the post office and then took off from there.

This seemed odd but harmless, and no one paid much attention, though there were various opinions about the reason for it. Aunt Rhoda thought Aunt Blanche didn't want the mailman to know all her business, and to prevent this, just picked up her own mail. This was a sore point with Aunt Rhoda, since
her
mailman was notorious for reading postcards and return addresses and, on at least one occasion, for observing that Aunt Rhoda certainly did a lot of business with the Spencer Corset Company.

My mother thought Aunt Blanche had a romantic interest in Clifford Sprague, who worked at the post office and, like Blanche, had been widowed young. Uncle Frank thought there was something vaguely crooked about it—not on Aunt Blanche's part, but on the part of someone else— someone using an anonymous post office box, maybe, and trying to peddle nonexistent real estate or gold mine stock to foolish widows.

Typically, no one ever asked for an explanation—probably because no one would ever allow himself to be driven by Aunt Blanche. My mother was usually willing to ride with her, but since Mother thought she
knew
the reason behind the post office stop, and wanted to encourage the romance of Aunt Blanche and Clifford Sprague, she said nothing for fear of upsetting the apple cart.

Of course Louis would have asked, and would have accepted any of the above reasons, or any other reason, or, as it finally turned out, the
real
reason, without batting an eye, since his own reasons for doing things rarely had much to do with the logic of a situation.

But we almost never got inside Aunt Blanche's car. “We'd never see you again,” my father always told us. “Is that what you want?”

To Louis and me this was both mysterious and intriguing, and we kept hoping for some combination of broken-down cars and urgent errands that would require us to be driven by Aunt Blanche. There wasn't much chance of this though—the only car which was consistently broken down or smashed or pushed in was Aunt Mildred's, and the only errands Mother considered urgent were those involving medical emergencies . . . in which case she would obviously not call on Blanche, lest Blanche haul the victim (bleeding or choking or giving birth) first to the post office and then all over town.

“I think I'm the only one who's really comfortable riding with Blanche,” Mother often said, and this was true. Neither of them was ever in a hurry to get anywhere, or dismayed to end up at an unexpected destination. “We always have a good time,” Mother said . . . and even after the misadventures connected with her Uncle John's funeral, she insisted that it had been a pretty ride to get there, despite the complications.

This Uncle John was a relative unknown to Louis and me: The first we heard of him was through a telegram, delivered to Mother over the telephone.

“Uncle John Lane has died,” she told us, “in Springfield, and the funeral is the day after tomorrow. He was my father's brother,” she went on, “and I knew he was at a nursing home in Springfield, but no one's ever heard from him, or anything about him, so that's all I know.”

How could this be, I wondered, in so nosy a family? This was my father's first question too when he heard the news.

“I just don't know,” Mother said. “Nobody knows. Frank thinks maybe he had a fight with my father years ago. Rhoda said maybe he got wounded in World War I and just never came home. Mildred never heard of him.

“Of course we're all going to the funeral.” She hurried right on, handing out reasons for this as if she were dealing cards. “. . . last of his generation . . . must be nearly a hundred years old . . . some of us
have
to show up . . . Mildred says we owe it to the past and to the future. . . .”

Perhaps Mother considered this lofty thought the last word in reasons, but my father did not. “Mildred!” he said. “Mildred just wants to go to Springfield.”

“Well . . . what's wrong with that? She's never been there. I've never been there. The children have never been there.”

“You're not going to drag them all that way!”

“Why, of course,” Mother said. “They're the future.”

Louis said later that this worried him a lot—he was afraid it meant that someone was going to point us out at the funeral, make us stand up, maybe even recite something about life. Still, he wanted to go. We both did—“all that way” sounded to us like foreign travel.

The arrangements turned out to be difficult. Of those who wished to go, only two were willing to drive.

“Let me guess,” my father said. “The tortoise and the hare.”

“I suppose you mean Blanche and Mildred,” Mother said . . . but she did not deny that they were, in fact, the very ones, and my father said he might just as well drive himself, that otherwise he would sit home and worry.

He ended up both driving and worrying, though, because at the last minute an extra cousin appeared, and in the ensuing scramble for seats (especially seats in our car) Mother was seen to climb in with Aunt Blanche, who immediately took off (presumably for the post office), while Mother stuck her head out a window and called, “We'll see you along the way!”

There had been some talk of forming a caravan, in which the three cars would stay together, but my father said he would have no part of it, and discouraged everyone else from such a plan. “If Mildred is the number-one car,” he said, “you'll lose Blanche at the first traffic light, and if Blanche is number one, you'll never get there.”

Nevertheless, he became increasingly uneasy as time passed and we saw no sign of Mother and Aunt Blanche along the road. “Don't know where they are,” he muttered from time to time, “. . . all going in the same direction on the same highway.”

The late-arriving cousin, Howard Grashel, picked up this mood and kept saying, “Seems like the earth swallowed them up—seem to you like the earth swallowed them up?” till my father finally said, “For heaven's sake, Howard, shut up. You'll scare the kids.”

But Louis and I didn't think there was anything to be scared about, believing, as we did, that grown-ups (even the grown-ups related to Mother) could take care of themselves. Had Mother been riding with Aunt Mildred we might have been scared, for Aunt Mildred passed us—honking and waving and then disappearing in the distance—“Like a bat out of hell,” Howard said.

My father seemed to feel better after that. It reminded him, he said, that it was better to be late to a funeral than to require one.

“What happens when you're late to a funeral?” Louis asked me, for he was still fearful of public recognition. “Do you just walk in, in the middle of it? Do they stop while you walk in and sit down?”

“We're not going to be late, Louis,” my father said. “It's your mother who's going to be late, unless they stop somewhere and take a taxicab.”

To everyone's surprise, this was what they did.

At the very last minute, as we stood outside the funeral home, looking up and down the street for any sign of Aunt Blanche's Ford sedan, a blue-and-yellow taxicab pulled up at the curb and out of it stepped Mother and Aunt Blanche.

“Let's go right in,” Mother said, hurrying up the steps, “I'll explain everything later.”

“At least explain the taxicab,” my father said.

“We were so late—it seemed like the best thing to do—Oh! . . .” She smiled. “Look at all these people. Isn't that nice?”

There were a lot of people, all very old, and all, naturally, strangers to us except for Aunt Mildred and her passengers.

“I hope Mildred thought to tell the minister who we are,” Mother whispered.

It was immediately clear that Aunt Mildred had done so, because the minister based his entire remarks on the fact that so many had come so far to pay final tribute. He talked about life and death, and generations, and the old and the young (here Louis scrunched way down in his seat) . . . “Mildred and Rhoda,” the minister said, “Frank and Grace and their families . . .”

When it was over Mother went to thank the minister, but my father said it ought to be the other way around, that he should thank us. “Makes you wonder what he was going to talk about before we showed up,” he said.

To our surprise Mother came back right away, looking distracted, and hurried Louis and me out ahead of her. “We're not going to the cemetery,” she said. “I told him we had to get right back. He understood. Where is everybody? Let's get out of here.”

“They're outside,” my father said. “What's the matter with you?”

“Oh!”—Mother rolled her eyes—“I didn't know what in the world to say! Fred, that's not Uncle John in there!”

“What do you mean?” My father stared at her. “Who is it?”

“
I
don't know!”

“Well, didn't you ask the minister?”

“Why, I couldn't say anything to the minister! I couldn't ask him, ‘Who is this?' He just preached his whole sermon about us being the family!”

There was a lot of discussion and disagreement: Was this the right funeral home? Had Mother misunderstood the telegram? “How do you know it isn't him?” Aunt Rhoda demanded. “You never saw him. None of us ever did.”

“I saw pictures,” Mother said. “He was a little, short, bald man, and this is a big tall man with lots of hair and a beard.”

While everyone argued about what, if anything, to do, my father went back in to talk to the minister, who was surprised and puzzled, but found a silver lining to it all. He said that Mr. Johnson (whose funeral we had just attended) had no family at all, that his mourners were simply fellow residents at a nursing home, and that since we were all children of God and therefore kin, our presence was in no way inappropriate.

Aunt Mildred and Aunt Rhoda seemed willing to let it go at that. For one thing, Aunt Blanche was beginning to worry about her car, which was parked at a restaurant called Randolph's Ribs. “They were all very nice,” she said, “trying to give us directions, and then calling us a cab and all . . . but they're not going to want my car sitting there all day long.”

Mother said she'd never heard of such a thing, and now that we were here, we were going to locate Uncle John Lane, dead or alive, if it took a week.

Fortunately it only took my father about twenty minutes to figure out, and to confirm, that there had been some mix-up at the nursing home, inhabited by both Uncle John Lane and Mr. Johnson.

“They don't know much at that place,” he said, “but they do seem to know that
one
of them is deceased, and the other one isn't.” He also said that he intended to call someone to account for this outrageous mistake, but Mother wouldn't let him.

“That sounds as if we're mad because he isn't dead,” she said; “and anyway, these things happen all the time.”

“That is simply not true,” my father said—but of course he was in the company of people to whom such things
did
happen all the time, and they bombarded him with examples: “Remember Pauline . . . took the wrong baby home from the hospital?” “Remember Lloyd's dog Vergil that got listed in the telephone book, and after that got all the mail and the phone calls?” “Remember Audrey? . . . Calvin? . . . Maxine?”

Aunt Mildred summed it up. “Happens all the time, Fred.”

“Not to me,” my father said . . . but he had no wish to sue the nursing home, or to take Uncle John Lane out of it—for it proved to be a bright and homey place—so he settled for firm assurances that such a thing would never happen again.

Uncle John Lane turned out to be just what Mother said he was—a little, short, bald man: very old, very cheerful and very deaf, who said he was glad to see us and invited Louis to help him do his jigsaw puzzle. “It's a picture of some dogs,” he said, “or the Rocky Mountains—hard to tell.”

After a flurry of explanations and introductions, Mother and Aunt Rhoda tried to decipher the mystery of Uncle John, but they didn't have much luck. They had to yell, and neither one really wanted to yell about family matters for everyone to hear—and besides, Uncle John said yes to everything.

“I hope it wasn't a misunderstanding about money,” Mother said, and Uncle John nodded. “That's right.” “Political argument?” “That's right.” “Heard you just never came home after the war. . . .” “That's right.”