My Other Life Read Free Page B

always an element of doubt about the true paternity of a child. And similarly in
Beowulf
you see the same affinity, and a specific Anglo-Saxon word for the relationship—the uncle and nephew usually fighting together in battle."
    As he spoke, the propeller on his beanie still spun.
    "Paulie, don't you see that I am showing you how to fight," he said, "and how to live?"
    The propeller slowed as he stared at me. I was too afraid to say anything.
    "What are your plans?"
    "I joined the Peace Corps. I'm going to Africa. Nyasaland."
    "Capital, Zomba," Uncle Hal said. Jerking his head in a nod of self-congratulation, he got the propeller going again.
    He went to a bookshelf and hunted for a moment, then found what he was looking for, a bulky biography entitled
Rimbaud.
He opened it and, with the propeller on his beanie still slowly turning, he read, '"I am obliged to chatter their gibberish, to eat their filthy messes, to endure a thousand and one annoyances that come from their idleness, their treachery, and their stupidity. But that is not the worst. The worst is the fear of becoming doltish oneself, isolated as one is, and cut off from any intellectual companionship.'"
    Listening, but also watching the propeller on his beanie, I was too distracted to reply.
    "Am I keeping you?" he asked in a voice as dry as paper.
    He's a terrible enemy,
people used to say,
but he can be much worse as a friend.
    We saw less and less of him. He stopped phoning. He didn't even call us when he needed to move a ladder or jump-start his car. Instead, we heard stories about him. His name would come up and someone in the room would say softly, in a wounded voice, "I once got a letter from Hal," and would turn pale and serious, remembering. You would not want to hear any more.
    Or someone would tell how Uncle Hal had been very ill and had spent a month in the hospital. We would feel ashamed that we had not known. But then the stories would come out—how he insisted on wearing his bobble hat while being x-rayed; how he had accused a distinguished surgeon of stealing his old pocket watch; how he had run up an enormous phone bill by making repeated calls to London, England; how he had begged his nurse to marry him and then changed his mind when he discovered that she had been recently divorced. "Damaged goods" was all he said. After he was discharged from the hospital, the telephone in his room was found missing, and an armchair, and a huge bottle ("For Institutional Use") of aspirin.
    Another story began circulating—that he had been seeing a psychiatrist for some time, that he had told this man about his childhood, and how his mother, my grandmother, had never picked him up when he had cried in his crib. And that was not all. There were childhood humiliations, episodes of loneliness and rejection and total isolation, and tales of his imaginary friend Robin, who was sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl, and his nightmares and his rituals about opening jars and crossing streets.
    In this story about Uncle Hal and the psychiatrist, the analysis went on for about a year, and then after listening to so many of these sad, strange tales, the psychiatrist became depressed, canceled the remainder of the sessions, and killed himself.
    Uncle Hal vanished so completely we thought that he had died. People wondered about him, and then even the stories stopped. We moved. There was no word of him. Better not to ask, we said. We got on with our lives, feeling steadier and more certain now that he was gone.

    He was not dead. How silly of us not to have realized what he had been doing all this time.
    When Uncle Hal's novel was published it was praised for its humanity, its luminous subtlety, its sense of fun, its quiet wisdom. It was, everyone agreed, a masterpiece of sanity and elegance.

TWO
The Lepers of Moyo
1
    B OARDING THE TRAIN in the African darkness just before dawn was like climbing into the body of a huge, dusty monster. I rejoiced in the strangeness