When We Visited Our Rich Uncle

My Uncle Don’s house was on a river in Indiana. It was a three-story colonial with a row of thick white pillars running the entire front of the house. Surrounding were acres of lawn and carefully sculpted bushes and flowering trees. It was astonishing, really, that our family would know a person who owned such a house.

Uncle Don was high up in General Motors. He ran the battery division and was on his way to the top floor of the GM Building in Detroit when we went to Indiana for his daughter’s wedding in 1958.

It was not t been a pleasant ride.

Early in the trip, my mother made her pitch for staying at Uncle Don’s house. He was her big brother, handsome, gregarious, and very successful. When we gathered at our grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, he always arrived in a black Cadillac driven by his wife so he could read important papers and write letters in the back seat. She was his chauffeur we would tease, and she would laugh, kick off her heels and make a drink.

“Don invited us to stay at the house, Roy. We should take him up on his offer.” She said this in the confidential tone she used for front seat conversations. The three of us in the backseat heard parts of the front seat dialogue but not all. The car windows were always rolled down, so hats and books and words were always flying around in a mess.

“We’re not stayin’ at Don’s, Ginna. We’ll stay at a motel.” Part of me wanted to make a pitch for staying at my uncle’s but making pitches like that was not done in our family. My dad would have pulled the car over to the side of the road and looked at me in the rearview mirror like grass was growing out of my head.

Instead, I counted telephone poles as we barreled down the two-lane road. My always very mad 16-year-old sister had one window seat and my book-reading 19-year-old brother had the other. My 10-year-old self sat in the middle with my feet up on the hump. It was a long ride, especially with the commencement of my mother’s silent treatment, but the counting helped.

We all knew dad wouldn’t let us stay at our uncle’s fancy house. He had some kind of thing about Uncle Don – competition, resentment, envy? It was a feeling he had. We all knew about the feeling even though we couldn’t name it and wouldn’t try. Back then, what my dad thought about a thing was like the air we were breathing, so, whatever it was, we all felt it.

As soon as we arrived at my uncle’s, he insisted on a tour of the house, and I could feel my parents brace themselves, like this was exactly the thing they were dreading, the evidence of my uncle’s success, his better education, his wiser life decisions. The house had many incredible things – a bowling alley in the basement, a fountain in the living room, a wide spiral staircase, seemingly a dozen beautifully appointed bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, a ballroom on the top floor with wood floors that looked like they’d been polished that morning. But the most awesome thing of all was a pipe organ – an enormous organ with rows of pipes that reached to the ceiling. My uncle lived in a house with a pipe organ.

The day after the wedding, we came back to my uncle’s house for breakfast. All of the food was in silver warming dishes on a sideboard with refills brought from the kitchen by two Black servants who wore black and white uniforms and smiled at us like we were the most prized guests ever. I had no idea how to act or what to do.

“Toast and coffee are just fine for me.” My dad waved away the servants, didn’t even peek at the silver-stored food but my mother motioned for us to fill our plates. It would have been discourteous not to eat, that was her message. Looking back, it’s amazing how much of my family’s communication was subliminal. We moved with whichever parent had the most powerful aura at the moment. The motel issue had been his powerful moment, eating a proper breakfast was hers.

Packed back in our car, retracing the two-lane road that got us there, the windows down, of course, and the wind whipping our hair, there was satisfaction with our visit. Where there could have been envy or unhappiness, there was an atmosphere of pride, of accomplishment. We had attended the wedding, toured our rich uncle’s house, stayed in a motel, eaten breakfast with servants waiting on us, and now we were going to our three-bedroom ranch house with one bathroom and a lawn scorched by the August sun, and we were eager to be home.