Thirty Six: “You Probably Thought Tennessee Williams Was Making All That Shit Up”

No one loved Uncle Benny, except Aunt Marilyn. And well his children I suppose, but I’ve never been close to them. I haven’t seen them since Benny and Marilyn’s 50th anniversary party several years ago and doubt I’ll recognize any of the boys at first glance. Still, I must appear at the interment this afternoon at Metairie Cemetery.

My last strong memory of him was sitting on my mother’s sofa next to my ex-, with a big picture album he had brought full of photos of my first wife. He was insistent on sharing them with my ex-. That only begins to plumb the depths of my distaste for him, but they say never speak ill of the dead so perhaps I will stop there. I know that my mother would stop talking to my aunt or vice-versa at times, usually over something Benny did.

Fortunately, they moved to Baton Rouge when I was young, and I rarely saw them afterwards unless they drove down to visit my parents. I do not even wish to imagine the Southern Gothic consequences if we had all lived in some smaller Louisiana town. There is enough oddity and sadness in the branches of the family I like to fill a book. I think if all of the branches of the Folse and Hilbert families were stacked up together in some mythical parish I could write something that would make Lie Down in Darkness positively cheerful.

Everyone down here thinks they have an odd family, but I would gladly put mine up on display for a bet. When my brother took his own life and my boss raised an inquisitive eyebrow while I was asking for leave, I simply told her, “you probably thought Tennessee Williams was making all that shit up.” She had played Blanche DuBois in a Minot, N.D. college production of Streetcar. That was explanation enough. (I still chuckle to think of all those sons and daughters of Ibsen doing Williams.)

It would be easy enough not to show up this afternoon, but my sister is down from Kansas and insisted mother come out of the nursing home in an ambulance company van for the service. I would not be burning any bridges of significance if I were absent, but if mother is there then it is time to go into the closet and take out the dark suit and the heavy, ceremonial mask of filial piety.