The Afterlife: A Memoir

PART II

For a time when I was a boy, my father’s brother, my uncle Eldridge — a man, as I think of him now, both like and unlike other men — became my friend and companion. Today I cannot think of my uncle without remembering his car and the things he carried in it. In the backseat he kept a bicycle with the front wheel removed. I never saw him put the wheel on and ride. Next to the bicycle was a golf bag holding woods and irons, balls, tees, pencils for scoring, golf gloves, a visor. Adjacent to the clubs were a couple of beach chairs folded and jammed between the car’s front and backseats, and wedged on the seat were towels and a cooler chest, into which he loaded, every day or two, ice, beer, and strawberry, grape, and orange sodas. In the car’s trunk, as I remember it, were his tennis racquets with their protective covers zippered on, and a tennis bag like those the pros carry onto the court, stuffed with balls in cans, cotton sweatbands, shorts, shirts, tennis shoes, socks, and a hat. There was a football for playing catch at the beach, and a pump for pumping up the ball. There were baseball mitts and a baseball; and there was fishing gear — a takedown rod stored in its elegant cylindrical case, and a small tackle kit packed with hooks, lures, and line — and there was swimming and, sometimes, I recall, scuba equipment, including a mask, fins, a snorkel, a dive knife, a depth gauge, a regulator, a buoyancy vest, a weight belt, and, shoved up into the back of the trunk — though in order to make space for it, he might have been forced, in a gesture of triage, to sacrifice other items — a small tank that actually belonged to me. In the event that he had occasion to dress nicely on land, he had what was minimally required. Pressed trousers. A clean shirt. A tie, rolled up. Changes of underwear. Thin socks. A belt. Black shoes with shoe trees inserted in them. Shoe polish. A rag for polishing. There was a shaving kit holding a razor and soap, shampoo, talcum powder, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush and a comb, and plenty of the English Leather cologne he splashed on at intervals throughout his day. There was a battery-operated portable record player, and Everly Brothers, Clancy Brothers, and Smothers Brothers records to play on it. For reading, he carried a collection of hunting, tennis, golf, and archery magazines, Playboy and Penthouse, and books by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell. For shooting, he kept, in a space near the tire well, a.22 pistol in a leather case; and sometimes there was a double-barreled shotgun; and, when he had the shotgun packed in the car and planned to do some shooting with it, there might also be a cardboard box containing clay pigeons, many of which I threw for him, using a spring-loaded contraption designed for manually launching the fragile yellow disks. There was no shortage of ammo. And there were many things relating to the maintenance of the car in specific and to safe travel in general: spark plugs, antifreeze in a jug, motor oil in a can, socket wrenches, jumper cables, sulfur flares. There was tanning lotion; and there were Band-Aids and other medical supplies, including an Ace bandage; and writing materials and postage stamps; and, tucked here and there in nooks and crannies, golf shoes, an umbrella, a rain poncho, a thermos, a Swiss Army knife, bottle and can openers, a pair of binoculars, a Frisbee.

On days off from his job, loading Canada Dry delivery trucks at a warehouse near the airport in Sarasota, Florida, he used to golf or lie on the beach or play tennis at the municipal courts with his friends from work, and sometimes he’d drive to a secluded place in the woods, where he would set up one of the folding beach chairs, place beside it the cooler and a handful of his books and magazines, put a record on the record player, and sit listening to folk music, flipping through the magazines, looking at the world through his binoculars, sipping beer, and, every now and then, shooting pistol rounds at empty cans he’d propped on tree branches or rotting fence posts in the distance. One day, according to my mother, state and federal agents surrounded him, then handcuffed him and took him into custody, because he had been spotted by surveillance teams sent in advance of President Nixon, who was about to land in Sarasota on Air Force One. When the agents took him to the local police station, the chief of police told them, “Oh, that’s just Bob Antrim, he doesn’t mean a bit of harm,” which was true enough; and so they promptly let him go.

His name was Robert Eldridge Antrim. He was known in his family as Eldridge to distinguish him from his father, also Robert, and among his friends as Bob, but he was also occasionally called Sam. The name Sam in relation to my uncle first appeared in the mid-fifties, in the sports pages of a Sarasota newspaper, in an article glorifying the Sarasota High School golf team, for which Eldridge was a star player. In fact, it was Eldridge who had reported his name as Sam, presumably because he had grown tired of Eldridge. It was a joke; and the joke stuck, though by the end of his life the only person still calling him Sam was my mother, who was with him at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital when he died, in 1992, of acute alcohol poisoning. When I was young, I knew my uncle as Eldridge. For a few years, when I was a teenager, he was a hero to me. Today, when I think of him, he is Bob, and I think this transformation from Eldridge to Bob by way of Sam has something to do with the effect he had on my life, in particular the effect of a single incident that took place when I was fourteen years old.

We were living in Miami, my mother, my father, my sister, our absurd cats — Zelda Fitzgerald and the neurologically impaired Siamese, Justine — and I. Eldridge, during those years, the early seventies, lived up the Gulf Coast in Sarasota, in a suburban tract house he shared with his mother, my grandmother Eliza. The story of Eliza’s life is, in some ways, unusual for a woman of her time. She grew up during the early years of the twentieth century, in Richmond, Virginia, in what was, according to my father, a strict Episcopalian home ruled by a patriarch who was stern with his sons and possessively doting toward his only daughter, who nevertheless managed to escape to nearby Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, and then to Columbia University, where she earned a master’s degree in Spanish. During her years away at school, a medical student from San Juan, Puerto Rico, took up residence — I don’t know the particulars of the arrangement — in her father’s house. Over the course of her vacations at home, Eliza fell in love with this man, and even went so far as to board ship and sail with him to Puerto Rico to visit his home. Rafael was, according to family lore, the love of my grandmother’s life. I imagine him as a person formed in a certain European mold: erudite and very likely soft-spoken, a man wearing clothes made to draw attention away from his physique, from, as it were, his person — not in order to obscure the fact that he is, in my mental picture of him, neither tall nor fit but, rather, to hide, out of sheer politeness, his intrinsic attractiveness, which is to say his unsuitability as a life partner for a young woman brought up in an essentially Victorian household. About matters so far removed in time and sensibility from one’s own, one can only guess. My father told me that when Rafael’s stay in America ended he begged Eliza to marry him. She made it clear that she loved him but could never marry a Catholic. And that, apparently, was that. Her lover went home without her. They saw each other once or twice again over the years. And then, when she was very old and in failing health, as if bearing out the eroticism inherent in loving a person one cannot bring oneself to marry, she did something surprising and beautiful. She bought a plane ticket for San Juan. She did not tell anyone her intentions. She appears to have had no specific intentions. Alone in Puerto Rico, she visited the places she remembered from her time there with Rafael, who had died a year or two earlier.

Eliza’s life, it seems to me, turned out quite differently from whatever she might have hoped for when she was a woman in her twenties, taking flight, however incompletely or abortively, from her father’s house. It is my understanding that after she returned home from New York she lived for a time in a sort of domestic captivity, like a Virginian Elizabeth Barrett Browning, until it was arranged that she would marry a distant cousin, Robert Antrim, a man older than she, a man she likely did not love passionately. Robert Antrim was in those years the manager of the Blandy Experimental Farm, now the Virginia State Arboretum, a University of Virginia teaching farm near Winchester. He was taciturn and hardworking, and he and Eliza had two sons. Then one day Robert Antrim took it into his head that it was his destiny to raise gladioli in Florida. He and his brother, Frank, had for some time been going on annual car trips together — speechless two-week-long excursions to central Florida and back. They had an old Ford, and were known for driving slowly.

I can remember, from my childhood, my father’s father’s slow driving. Many years after Robert and his brother took their first trips down the Atlantic seaboard, and long after Robert Antrim had settled his family in Sarasota, near the end of his life, when my sister and I were young, he used to drive us, in his blue Mercedes diesel sedan, to the Ringling Museum of the Circus, part of the grandiose folly of an estate left by the great John Ringling after he fell into debt and, in 1936, the same year my father was born, died of pneumonia. The Ringling complex is located on Sarasota Bay, and includes John and Mable Ringling’s enormous and weirdly decorated winter residence, Cà d’Zan; and the Ringling Art Museum filled with minor Old Masters and Baroque paintings and tapestries; and a theater in the Italian Baroque style, the Asolo; and the Museum of the Circus, all originally constructed using buildings and parts of buildings painstakingly disassembled, crated up, and shipped from northern Italy to Florida in the 1920s and early thirties. Attached to the painting galleries is a library in which my father, in his free time as a young museum guide working afternoons after school and over summer vacations, read art history. It was here, according to my mother, that Sir Anthony Blunt, the infamous spy and historian of Renaissance and Baroque art, upon finishing a tour of the museum’s collections, invited my father, who had conducted the tour, to attend the Courtauld Institute in London. This took place before Blunt was exposed as a Russian agent and stripped of his knighthood. I sometimes wonder how things might have gone in our family had my father accepted Sir Anthony’s offer. In the event, things were as they were, which meant that my sister and I, when children in Sarasota, were unfailingly greeted, at the entrance to the Museum of the Circus, by Cookie, a midget wearing an ornate red coat. Cookie was famous as the Munchkin who, in the Munchkinland sequence in The Wizard of Oz, presents Dorothy with a bouquet.

Anyway, I remember from those trips that my grandfather never drove his Mercedes at a speed greater than twenty-five or thirty miles an hour — in contrast to my other grandfather, Don Self, who kept in his carport Oldsmobiles and Buicks of the massive sort that easily handled ninety miles per hour on the interstate — and I remember, in some way that is as much emotional as pictorial, the scenery that characterized that part of Florida in the years before the Gulf Coast became the densely populated, semiurban landscape it is now.

Coastal Florida at that time was much as one might have imagined it, and, I suspect, much as people would have liked it — people who, like my father’s family from Virginia and my mother’s from Tennessee, moved south to get in on one of the miniature economic booms, which, during the forties, fifties, and sixties, spurred growth and brought jobs to the developing seaside sprawl. Florida in those long-gone days was, as I remember it, a realm of tannin-black rivers and crystal springs; of live, unpolluted oyster beds two feet under the shallow bay and estuary waters; of red tile roofs showing here and there above the royal palms and the mangrove thickets that opened onto white beaches accessible by humpbacked bridges that were always crowded, in the magic hours before sundown, with fishermen reeling in grouper, snapper, and snook. What I remember most from my early childhood in Florida is an intensity of color both in and above the water, as clouds swept eastward over the ocean, bringing afternoon showers that could begin with a few drops carried on the wind, then abruptly open up and rain down, flooding the streets, the sidewalks, the lawns and tennis courts, the entire world it seemed to me, before eventually, after little more than an hour or two, blowing inland. Often, during storms, a greenish cast of light filled the subtropical sky over Siesta Key, infusing the palm fronds and the leaves of the trees with an even brighter green, yet turning the gulf and the bay, into whose low swells gulls and pelicans were forever diving, a deep, almost olive shade that I have never seen in water anywhere else.

But what about my taciturn grandfather and his taciturn brother? Legend has it that, on a certain slow pilgrimage to Titusville or Arcadia, they pulled into one of the ubiquitous roadside places where plaster birdbaths and imitation Greek and Roman statuary got sold to migrants and retirees with delusions of grandeur. Using as few words as possible, the brothers asked the owner what he thought his inventory might be worth in cash. The owner told them that he imagined the entire stock might be worth about forty dollars. Without another word, the brothers produced the forty dollars, a twenty-dollar bill apiece, a grand amount for workingmen in the years immediately following the Second World War. They started the car and drove wordlessly down the road about a quarter mile — I don’t know which of them, Robert or Frank, was at the wheel — then turned the car around, motored back up the highway, steered into the entrance to the lot, and plowed through the statues at some remarkably low velocity, destroying every one. It is hard to know how to judge this story, particularly given that neither brother was much of a talker; and so I wonder who first told about the roadside stand and their fraternal telepathy and the pulverized birdbaths, and to whom. I find the tale pleasing.

All things considered, it seems that Bob — or, I should say, Eldridge — never had optimum chances for success in life. In addition to the difficulties imposed by an eccentric father and an imperious mother, he had to contend with his older brother, my father. In stories my mother told about him, my father as a young man comes off as an intimidatingly popular and accomplished student, clearly in the most-likely-to-succeed category, and much doted on by his mother, who, removed at last to Florida, had become the Sarasota High School Latin teacher, known to her students as Old Caesar. And, in fact, Eliza Antrim had in good measure the kind of sober reserve with which urbane people carry themselves when living in environments that are essentially colonial. The same could probably have been said for Julius Caesar, keeping order by the sword in the barbarous reaches of the empire. Unlike the historical Caesar’s imperial subjects, though, my grandmother’s students eventually moved on in life, escaping her rule. Even my father, who, by becoming a professor, a professional intellectual, fulfilled in part her dreams for him, was able to marry, have children, and build a life separate from his mother. My uncle remained her vassal for life.

Here’s some of what I know. In 1958, at the age of eighteen, Eldridge left home to study literature and art at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. He painted and made drawings, but none of his work survives from this period, or from any other in his life. After college, he moved north to New York City, where he settled into an apartment in the East Seventies and enrolled in the Manufacturers Hanover Trust executive-training program. It is unlikely that he had plans to support himself as an artist by becoming a bank vice-president. Apparently, he accumulated debts, spent evenings in the bars along Second and Third avenues, and either failed or simply dropped out of the training program, though not before meeting, in his classes on retail and commercial banking, the love of his life. M. was — and is — a beautiful and intelligent woman who remained until recently a successful banker. The fact that my uncle became, subsequent to his rapid exit from corporate culture, a cabdriver and an Upper East Side doorman did not deter M., who undoubtedly saw, as people will when profoundly attached to lovers on their way to falling through the cracks, some version of him that would forever exist as Potential.

I remember M. from a trip my family took to New York when I was ten and my sister nine; and I remember my uncle in his apartment, a place I thought of frequently when I found myself living in New York, in my own small, sparsely furnished walk-up only blocks away from where he’d lived twenty years before. The highlight of that trip was an afternoon at FAO Schwarz, the world’s greatest toy store, gift certificates — presents from Uncle Eldridge — clutched in our hands. I chose, after much exploring and considering (and perhaps in awareness that it was my uncle’s dream to get his pilot’s license and fly jumbo jets), one of those plastic planes driven by a loud, buzzing engine in circular orbit around the “pilot.” It was a cheap toy airplane destined to crash and break apart when, as soon as my father got it in the air (I never flew the thing), the handheld control lines became tangled and useless, causing the plane to jerk downward and nose-dive into the ground.

At any rate, M. was very much on the scene at that time, and my sister and I pestered her and Eldridge mercilessly about their getting married — why weren’t they married? — much as we would hound them about this in the years to come, even after our uncle had given up on New York and drifted down the coast, finally returning to Florida to live in his parents’ house, in a tiny wood-paneled room crammed with guns and ammunition, British novels, all manner of sporting gear, antique toy soldiers displayed on dusty shelves, a short and narrow bed with a tartan blanket, and, stacked within easy reach of the bed, back issues of the same kinds of magazines he kept in the trunk of his car — automobile, airplane, scuba, golf, tennis, rifle, archery, and Playboy.

It may have been his room that attracted me, when I was a teenager in Miami, to my uncle’s way of life. Everything about it seemed desirable to me, because it was his, I suppose, and because everything he did spoke to adolescent pleasures.

He created the illusion that he was his own man, and free.

I was thirteen when I started riding the bus across the Everglades to visit him. I used to sit by the window and watch for alligators in the black canals beside the highway, as, in the far distance, fires lit by heat lightning burned off the dry grass and the stunted pines that grew in clusters like innumerable tiny islands rising from the shallow waters south of Naples. By this time, around 1972, my grandfather Robert Antrim had died, and my uncle had more or less abandoned any dreams he might have had of a life somewhere removed from his mother’s house. My own mother’s drinking had reached a level best described as operatically suicidal, and she and my father — married, divorced, then remarried to each other — waged their war nightly. My sister had got busy saving herself through academics. I’d got busy flunking out. Our Siamese had eaten a poisonous South American toad and was afflicted with seizures that caused her to fall down and twitch violently. The other cat had reached the age at which vomiting was chronic.

And when in the deep of the night my mother came into my room swaying, half conscious and with gray smoke from her cigarette wreathing her face, shattered by bourbon and white wine; and when she raised her hand to strike, and I easily batted her arm back, then stepped forward and quickly steadied her before she tipped; when, holding my mother upright, I looked past her to see my father watching us from the shadows outside my room, whispering that he was sorry for everything — when these things happened, there eventually came a point at which feeling, or whatever it is we call feeling, broke apart in me. And though it’s true that I felt anger and shame and fear — emotions that I live with still, more than thirty years after my solitary pilgrimages to the playtime world of Uncle Bob — it was also true that I felt nothing at all. And in order to share this feeling that was not a feeling, in order to be with another person, a man, as I realize now, who was like the man I might one day become, a man drained of feeling, I boarded a bus.

The bus carried me past Frog City and the Miccosukee Indian settlements, all those alligator-wrestling parks and airboat-rental outposts. At Naples, the scenery changed, and the bus took a right turn and headed up the suburban Gulf Coast, stopping in Fort Myers, Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte, and other centerless non-towns I can’t remember the names of, continuing north toward Venice, the home of retired circus performers, crossing one bridge after another and another, over narrow inlets and motorboats moored by the hundreds, before finally arriving, after what seems in memory an endless journey, in Sarasota, the town where I was born, and where my uncle, sunburned and smelling of English Leather and the beer he’d drunk the night before, waited to greet me at the station with the one question I have been trying to answer for myself ever since: “What do you want to do?”

We got in the car. We rolled down the windows. We turned on the radio. We began to drive. After a moment, I asked him the question I always looked forward to asking upon seeing him for the first time in a long time.

“Eldridge, what are you eating?”

“Pork chops.”

“How’re you fixing them?”

“I’m broiling them.”

“What are you having with them?”

“Spinach.”

“What else?”

“Rice.”

Or:

“String beans.”

Or:

“Fries.”

It worked out, he would explain — and my uncle was forced to explain this again and again, because people loved hearing it — that, over the course of a year, eating a menu that consisted of one entree per month (scallops in March; spaghetti in April; flounder in May), he got a balanced diet.

It is easy, looking back on all this now, to appreciate the despair and the terror inherent in my uncle’s preoccupations with self-sufficiency and preparedness, at home and in his car — particularly in the car, a four-door gas guzzler not unlike a rent-a-wreck version of the cars my mother’s father drove, a car different in every respect from the one that had, at a certain moment in my uncle’s youth, defined his enthusiasm for life. That car was a sexy, cherry-red Triumph TR3 with a walnut steering wheel and a rusted-out hole in the passenger-side floor — a casualty of salt air and the Florida weather — which forced the passenger to position himself extremely carefully, especially since the Triumph’s chassis rode quite low to the road. I was only seven or eight years old when Eldridge took me for drives in that car. As he accelerated and the RPM needle flickered on the dash, I would lean carefully forward and to the left, reaching, at my uncle’s invitation, to take hold of the wheel and guide the car along a straight path down the Sarasota streets.

But back to the story of Eldridge and his things. Each morning, he went to the carport and opened the trunk of the car. He stood before the items stowed there, moving and shifting his gear, replacing sweaty tennis clothes with clean ones, improving the overall packing dynamics, while, inside the house his white-haired mother, who often stayed up all night pacing, padded from bedroom to living room to porch to kitchen, worrying whether her son and grandson might eat a little breakfast before abandoning her for a day of horsing around and playing tennis and shooting pool with the friends from the Canada Dry loading dock out by the airport.

Once he’d established that everything was in order, that we had whatever we might need if, say, the world were to blow up and all life outside our car were to be catastrophically extinguished, we were off and running. Of what were our days together made? Looking back, I would say that our days were made of desire. We had structured activities, like tennis — I had not yet wrecked my shoulder with my high-toss, low-percentage, erratic yet explosive service, the theatrical serve of a flailing boy — and less formal pastimes, like wandering into convenience stores for supplies, crossing one of the crowded bridges leading to Siesta Key and the beach, driving north and dropping in at Joel’s house, stopping over afterward at Roger’s. There always came that point in tennis when the black clouds appeared from the gulf, and the rain came down, and everyone bolted off the courts and drank water. Then, just as suddenly, the sky would clear, and the world would become loud with the sounds of seagulls calling and smaller birds chattering. The sun would emerge, and we’d pick up mid-game, aiming to avoid puddles. After the game, we would walk out to the parking lot and my uncle would open the trunk of his car.

The trunk, as I see it now, was a physical repository, a form of warehouse or armory, in which my uncle secreted aspects of himself that would become, as the years went by, forbidden, denied, historical, forgotten. The things in the trunk were symbols of whatever in our lives — his and mine — might one day be taken away, totems representing sex and sport, music and work, eating and drinking, even talking and laughing. Together, my uncle and I stood in the parking lot with our hands in our pockets, staring at the pieces of the life we desired; and occasionally I would reach in and remove something, an article of clothing, for instance, or Eldridge’s disassembled fishing rod in its case. I might hold and admire the object, then put it back in its place, after which Eldridge would close the trunk and we would walk around to the sides of the car, open the doors, and get in. Our conversations were perfect. Whenever I said to him, in language sometimes having to do with home, sometimes with school, that I wanted to escape my situation, he nodded and suggested that we drive out to Siesta Key and have a swim at the beach before the sun went down.

The last day I ever spent with him, we played doubles with Roger and Joel. From the courts we could see Sarasota Bay and, lit violet against the red sunset, the shell-shaped roof of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, known because of its paint job as the Purple Cow. After the game, my uncle and I walked to the car. As usual, we peered into, rummaged through, and slammed shut the trunk. Possibly I asked Eldridge about M. Had she been to visit? Was she coming? Did he love her? Did she love him? Would they ever get married? Why not? Then we drove to Joel’s house, in a development near Bradenton. Immediately after we’d walked in the front door, the telephone rang. Joel’s wife answered, put the phone down on a counter, and said, “Bob, it’s your mother. She’s been calling.”

It happened frequently. Within a few hours of our leaving the house, his mother began dialing numbers for bars, restaurants, people’s homes, wherever he might be found. She wanted to know when he planned to return to her. She wanted to know if he was drinking beer. She wanted to know if he would be out late. She wanted to know if he was telling her the truth. I could hear him speaking into the phone in Joel’s kitchen, answering her: “Yes, Don’s here. Yes, he’s having a good time. No, I’m not letting him drink any beer. Yes, he’s had something to eat. No, I’m not driving fast. No, we won’t be out late.” So it went. When we left Joel’s and drove with Roger and Joel and Joel’s wife in a caravan to shoot pool on the enormous pool table that happened to be pretty much the only item of furniture in Roger’s living room — in Roger’s entire house, as far as I could make out — the telephone rang and again I heard my uncle speaking to my grandmother:

“Yes, we’re playing pool. No, we’re not betting any money. Don’t worry, I won’t let him drink any beer. Yes, we’ll be home soon.”

It was around this time that I was learning, in imitation of my uncle’s adult friends, to call Eldridge Bob.

“Bob, what are we eating?” I asked him when, later that night, after tennis and billiards, after we’d driven out Fruitville Road to the house, parked in the carport, and checked the trunk one last time, we left the world of the car and entered the realm of Eldridge and his mother.

The stove lights were on in the kitchen. On the other side of the house my grandmother moved about. I could see her in the shadows. She was a pale shadow in her blue housedress in her dark bedroom, behind sliding glass doors that opened through curtains onto the porch, where I slept on a sofa bed.

“Pork chops.”

“What are we having with them?”

“Fries.”

“All right. Is it time for Johnny Carson?”

“Just about.”

“Should I turn on the TV?”

“Turn it on,” he said. He was cooking, using the broiler and a fork. I sat in his room, where the TV was, staring at his magazines. My uncle, I remember, always had in his room a certain game for one player, Labyrinth, basically a wooden box fitted with a pivoting top, on which was fashioned a kind of maze through which the player maneuvered a steel ball. My uncle could turn the knobs and guide the ball safely through. I drank a soda and played the game for a while, and my uncle opened another beer for himself.

Eldridge was a tall and beautiful-looking man. He tanned in the sun to a reddish shade characteristic among people of Scottish descent. His forehead had a scar from the time he’d walked straight into a forklift blade. His beer gut did not detract from his appeal. He wore a gold chain. He looked as if he’d be right at home at the Playboy Mansion pool parties pictured in the magazines beside the bed.

Johnny Carson came on the television. We ate with our plates balanced on our laps. My uncle blanketed his pork chops beneath a layer of pepper. I did the same. The pork chops were dry and hard, and the pepper bounced off them. The television’s reception was fuzzy; its antenna had to be adjusted periodically. I was aware that I wanted to be like my uncle, aware as well that I wasn’t so sure about that. I complained to him about my father, who had begun to worry absurdly over my prospects, if I kept going the way I was going, for graduate school. Sometimes, when I complained, Bob taunted me for not having the courage to drop out of school altogether. I must have felt, somehow, that my uncle and his brother had, throughout their lives, been at odds with each other. Bob and I watched Carson host guest after guest. In my memory, this was the night that the comedian Steve Martin came on and stole the show with a cheap prop arrow sticking through his head. Or was it the night that Martin came out and did the half-a-beard routine?

I put my plate down, got up, and walked through the open glass doors to the sunporch. I heard Bob in his room, undressing. After a moment he came out and stood beside my sofa bed. He was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and he was making fun of me, but the joking had now passed the point at which it was pleasurable, because he had drunk so much.

I was standing beside the bed. He was standing beside me. He pushed me gently, and suddenly we were falling. We were wrestling on the bed. He climbed on top of me, and I squirmed beneath him. I was on my stomach and my uncle was on my back. He had my arms pinned. His movements were sluggish. We were wrestling, and then we were no longer wrestling. He forced me to stay still and be quiet. I could smell the salty, burned scent of his skin; and I could smell the warm beer on his breath as he exhaled against the side of my face. He stopped moving, and I stopped moving.

He breathed.

I breathed.

He was spread across me. His chest pressed me down into the bed. His face was next to mine.

How long did we stay like that, breathing together on the folded-out sofa? The moment did not last long. The time that elapsed was the time it took for our friendship to end. Had he passed out? Was he waiting for me to speak? Was it safe to move? I felt the dead weight of him on me, and my feelings about him, and about his way of life, changed. I perceived that this man on top of me was a drunk in his underwear, a man who ate the same food night after night in a room in his mother’s house, and I was terrified.

“Get up,” I told him. He lifted himself. He got off me. I watched him rise and walk unsteadily in bare feet to his room. The lights in his room went dark. I heard the springs squeaking inside his little bed; and I thought I saw, in the hours before I fell asleep, his mother, my grandmother, pacing behind the curtains drawn behind the glass doors leading to her room at the far end of the house. There had been a time, when I was little, that I had slept in her bed with her. But the far end of the house seemed to me, that night, after Eldridge had gone to bed, like a truly faraway place.

The next morning I told my uncle I had to leave Sarasota. I didn’t say why, and I don’t know whether he, in some way, understood. I just told him I had to go. He drove me to the station. He put me on a bus, and I rode the bus down the Tamiami Trail, stopping at the towns along the way, traveling south past Naples, southeast across the Everglades. After a long ride I saw, through the bus windows on the right, the enormous cement factory that, in those days, marked the end of the journey home.

When I was sixteen, I left Miami for boarding school in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Two years after that, I went north to college, and four years later I moved to New York, where I still live. During these years I saw my uncle only a handful of times. My mother, in the decade after she got sober, in 1983, made an effort to stay in touch with him. At some point, he and my grandmother moved from their house to a small apartment. It was in this apartment that Eliza died, and he was left alone. For years, he worked as a prep cook in a restaurant on Siesta Key. He used to go in late, after the restaurant had closed, and work until dawn, preparing and organizing food for the cooks who came in mornings to make lunch. My uncle liked this routine, because it protected him from ever having to see or talk to another person. He told my mother that he didn’t think he could go to AA and stop drinking, because he was afraid that his anger, were he not medicated by alcohol, might cause him to harm someone.

At the age of fifty-two, he died. My mother told me later that his weight had dropped precipitously, that he’d turned yellow, that, at the end, he’d bled through his skin. And she told me a story about the last year of his life, a story about a woman no one in our family had known a thing about.

Back when he was a boy, back in that ancient time when Robert Antrim was driving over birdbaths and urns, Eldridge had known a girl who lived on a farm that neighbored his mother’s brother Tom’s property on the James River, near Amherst, Virginia. My uncle and this girl had ridden horses together. The girl fell in love with Eldridge, and she never forgot him. Like Eldridge, she grew up to live a difficult life in which she became an alcoholic and found herself alone in the world. In the year before he died, she somehow tracked him down. She came to Sarasota to be with him for whatever time they had left. She tried to get him to eat, and she measured out what he could drink. She was dying herself, of a brain tumor. She was there — ensconced in the apartment my uncle had shared with his mother — when, in 1992, my mother drove to Sarasota to say good-bye to her ex-husband’s brother, whom she liked to refer to, in the spirit of the old days, as Sam. The story goes that, at the moment Sam died, this woman none of us knew, who was alone in the apartment, saw — so she later reported to my mother, an ideal audience — bloody footprints walk across the living-room floor.

I never know what to make of these kinds of stories, or of the people who tell them. The truth of the matter is that I neither believe nor wholly discount the tale of the bloody footprints, in part because I think Eldridge should be allowed a memorable parting gesture, a gesture of — what? Loneliness? The woman from Virginia became the custodian of his ashes, which she carried home to Virginia with her. Shortly after that, she, too, died. My mother told me, years later, that this woman from the farm on the river in the foothills of the Blue Ridge had had a brother, a man who lived deep in the woods, and who was rumored to be a violent person. My mother supposed that Eldridge’s ashes might have fallen into the hands of this man.

After his brother’s death, my father drove up the Tamiami Trail to Sarasota and cleared out the apartment. There was no funeral. I asked my father what had become of Eldridge’s rifles and his records, his scuba and golf and tennis gear, and he told me that these things had been replaced by high-caliber handguns and case after unopened case of small-arms ammunition, which he, my father, had dug out of the bedroom closet and hauled back to the gun shop, where he’d convinced the owner to buy them back.