I Remember Nothing [15]
After college, I moved to New York, and every so often Hal and Eleanor would come to town and take me to lunch or dinner. When I married my first husband, they gave us a large antique gilt candelabrum that I vaguely recall they claimed was Louis Quatorze. This cannot be true. After my divorce, Hal called to make sure my husband hadn’t walked off with it.
That candelabrum came with me to my apartment in the East Fifties, and then to my second marriage, where I distinctly remember it sitting, looking idiotic, in the garage in Bridgehampton. Where is it today, I wonder. I would really like to know, because it was fabulous and I’m finally old enough to appreciate it. No doubt it was a casualty of divorce. When you get divorced and you don’t get the house (which I never did), you leave behind all sorts of things you don’t have the sense to know you’ll someday wonder about, or wish you still had, or, worst of all, feel genuinely nostalgic for.
In 1974, Eleanor died. Years passed. I saw Uncle Hal in Washington and New York. My father and he were both widowers, they spoke on the phone from time to time, and afterward my father would call to bring me up to date. My father by then was in the early stages of forgetting things, but one thing he never forgot was a phone number, and in his later years he made at least a hundred phone calls a day, all of them brief. He never said hello and he never said good-bye. He didn’t give anyone a chance to say, “I’m busy” or “Lose my number” or “I don’t have time to talk.” He came right to the point and then, as my sister Delia wrote in her book Hanging Up, he hung up.
“I’ve just written my memoirs,” he would say, “and I’m calling them Me.”
“Great,” I would say.
He would hang up.
“I just called Kate Hepburn and I told her the name of my memoirs,” he would say. “She loved it.”
“That’s great, Dad.”
He would hang up.
I always hoped that he would show some interest in my kids, Max and Jacob, but he didn’t even remember their names. One day Jacob answered the phone and my father said: “Is this Abraham or the other one?” I consider it a testament to Jacob that at the age of seven, he knew it was funny. Still, it made me sad. You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be. But they’re never going to. And even though you know they’re never going to, you still hope they will.
My father’s bulletins about my uncle Hal were never about Hal himself but about Hal’s vast estate, which, according to my father, was being left entirely to my three sisters and me.
“I talked to Hal and you’re in the will,” he would say.
“You’re still in the will,” he would say.
“Four-way split among you four girls,” he would say.
“Big bucks,” he would say.
My father had minimal credibility at that point in my life, so it never crossed my mind to think that he was telling the truth, that I was going to be the recipient of inherited wealth. And Uncle Hal was in fine health. But then, one summer day in 1987, as I sat at my desk struggling with a screenplay I was writing in order to pay the bills, the phone rang; it was an administrator at a Washington, D.C., hospital, calling to say that Hal was dying of pneumonia and I should, as his next of kin, be prepared to make an end-of-life decision. I hung up, stunned. The phone rang again. It was Tedda Plotkin, wife of the radiologist, calling me, for the second time in my life, to say that Hal’s apartment in Washington was full of extremely valuable rugs and art and I should have it padlocked immediately or