DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 1)

I broke into a sprint as soon as I saw Uncle Mason’s car pull up to the front door. He’d been in Hong Kong on business and come straight from the airport, but even in absentia he’d made sure everything would be ready for the Fourth of July party. The housekeepers had cleaned every inch of every building. The pool and hot tub had been filled and chlorinated. The landscapers had trimmed every piece of greenery in the compound. The only thing missing had been him.

I threw myself into his arms as he got out of the car. “Hey, Anna,” he chuckled. “How you doing, kid?”

“What took you so long?” I demanded.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leading me to the house, his arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist. “I was hoping to be here before you guys arrived, but they were late refueling the plane in San Francisco, then we had to circle over Philly for a while, and on and on.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sounds like a sorry excuse.”

“I got news for you: that’s largely what adult life is—a series of sorry excuses.”

“Well, do better.”

“I fully intend to, fancy pants.”

I was seventeen, that age when precociousness morphs into arrogance, when you convince yourself that you’ve got the world all figured out, but you’re too frightened to actually deal with it. Uncle Mason had been my favorite—period—since I was twelve. That was when he moved back to Jersey, had the compound built, and based his business in Madsen.

The other kids had always been content to enjoy his property like it was an amusement park, but I liked talking to him. I could tell him about what was going on in school, and he’d teach me all the forbidden knowledge, everything beyond the purview of my textbooks. I could tell him the truth about what my friends and I had done this one night, even about boys, and he’d listen like a friend. And his two cents would be worth a million dollars, because he never wagged a finger or glared at me from under a furrowed brow. He’d take the time to understand where I was coming from. He’d remember when he was my age and share his own stories and never worry that I’d get the wrong idea. He’d always spoken to me like an equal. Even when he was talking about “adult life,” it was never with the stink of condescension. I got the sense that he hated it as much as I did, that he was giving me tips for how to handle it in the future, rather than drawing me a map and warning me not to deviate from the path lest I fall to my death.

He wasn’t like the rest of the family, and the rest of the family felt the same way. Mum-mum and my aunts were in the kitchen preparing the salad and sides for the barbecue. My mother had just joined them as Uncle Mason and I walked in.

“Hi, Mason,” she said. To call it perfunctory would be generous.

“How are you, Sue? Hey, Mom,” he said and kissed Mum-mum on the cheek.

“Oh,” my grandmother said, “so he’s here finally. Only two hours late.”

“I was thinking of you the whole time,” was Uncle Mason’s reply.

My mother pointed to me, and asked him, “Did she tell you she made honor roll?”

“No, she didn’t,” he answered, beaming.

“I always make honor roll,” I reminded my mother.

Her smile withered, and she gave me a look that contained the sum total of five hundred fights. She turned to Uncle Mason. “Listen,” she said, “I need to talk to you,” and raised her eyebrows in conspiracy.

I translated, “She wants to talk about the divorce.”

“Anna!”

“Am I wrong?”

“It’s a separation.”

“Whatever.”

“Okay,” Uncle Mason said, “Let’s talk.”

My mother looked at him like he’d just farted at the dinner table. “Well, go say hi to everybody first. I still have to get all this ready.”

Uncle Mason turned to me. “Hang with me.”

He greeted the rest of the women in the kitchen with kisses, ignoring the begrudging politeness with which they barely lifted their heads. He exited the main house to the patio, and I followed as he made his circuit. He greeted the elder statesmen of the clan, Uncle Pete and Uncle Francis and the like, in their seats on the patio. He shook their hands and asked how each of them was doing. They regaled him with tales of their most recent stress tests and how much fluid was pulled out of their knees, but they never bothered to ask about him. Some of the younger kids en route to another side of the pool ran past him. He greeted each of them by name, sometimes to no answer at all. He greeted the family matrons at their table in the shade by the pool. They all complained about how much worse their husbands were getting. “We’re going to have to take the keys from your uncle soon. The man can’t drive anymore.” “Do you know anyone at Saint Drausnius? Because Dr. Acampora wants to put your uncle on Coumadin, and I don’t think he needs it.” Then there was, “Barb, my hairdresser, her daughter’s recently a widow. You should meet her.”

That last one triggered Aunt Ginny. “What happened to Melissa?”

Aunt Theresa turned to her older sister. “Ginny, Melissa broke up with him years ago. Remember? We all thought she was the one…”

The other old women joined in, oblivious to Uncle Mason’s continued presence. The smile never left his face. If anything he accentuated it. Once they’d finished telling him to meet someone and give his mother some more grandchildren, as if she didn’t have enough, Uncle Mason moved on to the men of his generation gathered around the grill on the far side of the pool. They shook his hands, all smiles, but it only took a few minutes before they were needling him about politics.

“So, did the tax cut do anything for you, or do you still hate Trump?”

Uncle Mason said, “Well, I’d have preferred it if that money had gone to rebuilding dams or fixing bridges, so me and a few others are starting an NPO f for infrastructure improvement.”

I don’t think they heard him at all. They just kept going, not even insulting him but insulting Obama and Democrats in general and socialists, which I guess is what all Democrats are to them. I was a little surprised the n-word didn’t pop up. And Uncle Mason just stood there, taking it, never rising to challenge them, the smile never leaving his face.

I said, “Yeah, God forbid someone with money not hoard it all for themselves.”

My Uncle Rick said, “Excuse me, little girl, you’re speaking to adults.”

“And you’re insulting the man who invited you into his home. Who are you to lecture anybody?”

Before Uncle Rick could reply, Uncle Mason put his arm around me, turned me, and started escorting me away. “Anna, honey,” he said, “I got this. Thank you, but I got this.”

“They’re rude,” I spit.

“I know, but listen. I’m going to finish saying hi to everyone, then I have to talk to your mother. I’ll find you.”

I accepted the dismissal and wandered off. All I did for the next hour or so was wander. The little kids were all in the pool, playing games or trying to top one another with increasingly precipitous jumps off the high-dive. The girls who were all slightly younger than me were tooling around the three-hole golf course behind the house in motorized carts, practicing for the days they would get their licenses, getting a little taste of imaginary liberty. My younger brother, Felix, was with the other boys on the tennis court, using the net and surrounding cage for whatever asinine competition twelve-year old boys engage in, until one either breaks something or hurts himself, and a parent has to stomp over and put an end to it. I couldn’t find any of my older cousins, likely because they were hiding where they could imbibe one controlled substance or another with impunity.

I ended up leaning against a tree in the rolling pasture of Uncle Mason’s front yard. If there’d been rocks, I’d have kicked them. To my left Uncle Pete and some of the other older men were playing bacci. To my right some of my older cousins and younger uncles were playing bag toss. I could hear the kids in the pool playing. Everything around me was intact and functional, and I kicked a pinecone across the grass.

I don’t know how long I was there before Uncle Mason showed up. “Now,” he said, leaning against my tree, “where were we?”

“What’d my mother want? Money?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The divorce.”

Uncle Mason paused, then asked, “What have your mother and father told you?”

“Exactly what parents are supposed to: it’s not your fault, we still love you, all that.”

“Do you not believe them?”

“I believe them, but don’t bullshit me. They keep calling it a separation, but when mom has to step out of the room every time a lawyer calls, what am I supposed to think?”

“Why do you think your mother would need money?”

“ ‘Cause Dad makes more than she does, so he can hire better lawyers.”

“Do you miss your dad?”

“I see him and talk to him.”

“But he’s not in the house anymore.”

“That’s on her. He wanted to work things out. She didn’t.”

“Well, Anna, things haven’t been right between your parents for a while.”

“Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. It was always her voice I heard screaming when I was in my room. They would wait until Felix and I were supposed to be asleep, and then they’d talk, and she’d end up screaming. I never heard him raise his voice.”

He flashed me a lopsided smile and asked, “Did you ever open your door? Listen from the top of the stairs?”

I gave him a shit-eaten grin of my own.

“Yeah,” he said, “when my parents would fight, I would sometimes eavesdrop. After a while I realized I was hearing things I didn’t want to hear. When you’re a kid, you don’t realize your parents are as clueless as everyone else.”

We walked across the yard for a time, silent. I was grateful that he didn’t tell me that I would understand one day, long after that moment, when it would be of no use to me.

Uncle Mason said, “But tell me about the fun stuff. What about you and your friends? What are you guys excited about now?”

“Right now I’m not talking to them. Dakota… okay, right now Dakota is probably shacking up with her track coach.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It’s really happening. She admitted it to me and Janelle. And Janelle is thinking about sneaking down to Baltimore to meet this guy she started talking to online.”

“That’s not smart.”

“That’s what I told them. Both of them. I told Dakota she’s being statutory raped by Mr. Harlington, and Janelle could end up dead. She doesn’t know this guy. She doesn’t even know if he’s really the guy in the picture he sent her.”

“And they’re pissed at you for not supporting them.”

“I don’t know what they’re pissed at. Like, I’m their friend, and I’m just supposed to tell them to do whatever they want, even if they get hurt? No. That’s not a real friend.”

“Well, you’re right about that. Thing is, Anna, most people don’t want real friends.”

“If I was going to do something stupid, I’d want them to tell me not to.”

“But you wouldn’t think it was stupid.”

I couldn’t find a counterpoint to that, so we ambled over to the edge of the lawn in quiet. We walked along the fence of pines that ran the boundary of the compound.

“What about school?” Uncle Mason asked. “How are your grades?”

“I’m honor roll. Maybe you haven’t heard.”

He chuckled. “What’s your favorite subject?”

“I love English. My teacher last year, Mr. Lench, he’s great. Like, I get Shakespeare now. I swear to God. Like not every word obviously, but we read Macbeth, and he taught us to not be intimidated by the poetry and just get that these are people with very understandable desires and fears. It’s awesome.”

“Fantastic. You really should see Shakespeare live. The text itself is great, but there’s no comparison to seeing actors performing it. I’ll take you next time there’s a good staging.”

“That would be amazing.”

Uncle Mason nodded. “What else?”

“I like History too, but my teacher’s…”

“What?”

“No, it’s just my teacher last year. She was—okay so, she’s teaching us about the French Revolution, but she’s giving a way-too simplistic version of why it happened. Like, her origin is kind of like a Marxist reading of it, but it’s not even that close. It was just the first two estates versus the third. She doesn’t take the liberal nobles into account. She doesn’t consider that poor parish priests were all for reform. She completely skipped over how important the wars were.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Without the wars the French Revolution goes in a different direction. There’s no Reign of Terror.”

Uncle Mason asked, “Where’d you learn about the French Revolution?”

“I listen to history podcasts.”

“I thought podcasts were just comedians talking to each other.”

“They have podcasts about everything now. Search a topic and you’ll find a podcast on it.”

“Huh. So, how did you respond to her erroneous version of history?”

“First, she said I was wrong because that wasn’t what she was teaching. Then, I got detention for telling her she was teaching lies.”

“Oh, Anna, don’t ever tell a teacher they’re wrong. And don’t ever prove it in public.”

“Why?”

“People have gone to war rather than admit they were wrong. You tell someone in a position of power that they’re wrong, especially in public where they can be humiliated, all they hear is someone challenging their authority. From that point forward you’ve got a target on your back.”

“Yeah, Ms. Miklos hated me after that.”

“See?”

“Then she shouldn’t be a teacher.”

“If we only listened to people without flaws of their own, no one would listen to anybody.”

“So what, I should listen to Uncle Rick and Co. when they start shitting on Democrats?”

“Don’t conflate listening with obedience. You listen to your opponent so you can learn who they are, where they’re coming from, what they want, what they’re afraid of. You learn everything you can about your enemy, then you use that knowledge against them.”

“Yeah, and in the meantime white nationalists get to scream hatred and run over peaceful protesters because they elected rich versions of themselves.”

“ ‘You say you want a revolution?’ ”

I was barely able to spit the words out. “I-I feel sometimes like this country needs one.”

“We line the villains up against a wall, right? But then we’re no better than they are.”

“You can’t be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.”

Uncle Mason chuckled again. “Kid,” he said, “you know what rhetoric is?”

“It’s like spoken propaganda, right?”

“Rhetoric is persuasive language. That’s all. From the beginning, going all the way back to ancient Athens, it was all about persuading people to do what you wanted them to do and feel how you wanted them to feel. And even in the ancient world, long before psychology was a field of science, smart people recognized that human beings were governed by emotion much more than they were intellect. The Greeks and the Romans both recognized that rhetoric had nothing to do with presenting facts and parsing through evidence. Word usage, inflection, body language were all much more important. Rhetoric isn’t about intellectual arguments. It’s about emotional manipulation, and there’s no greater motivating emotion than fear. I’ve listened to every word you’ve said, and when you said, ‘You can’t be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance,’ you told me that you were so scared, you were prepared to deny another human being their humanity. That you can rationalize behavior you find revolting and hateful in other people when it’s for the greater good. And I think you already know that every holocaust and mass killing and act of terrorism, all the darkest acts in history were committed for the greater good.”

I scrunched my face into a knot of adolescent sulk, as if someone had spit my own bile into my mouth.

And as if on cue, Uncle Mason said, “And right now you’re angry because I just said you were wrong.” He looked at me with a smile. “Right?”

I looked up at Uncle Mason, confounded that a man so cultured and enlightened could be unfazed in the face of doom. “It’s scary,” I said.

He put his arm around my shoulder. “Sure it is,” he said. “You know it’s all fucked up, but you don’t know what you can do about it. That’s scary. And that’s why you listen to the other side. Sun Tzu—know your enemy. Knowledge is power, and the more you know, the less helpless you are.”

We’d rounded the front yard and reached the driveway. I didn’t want to go back, be around everyone, hear all the celebratory self-obsession. No words, well intended as they were, were going to turn the world upside-down.

Uncle Mason saw it. “I have an idea,” he said. “If you’d like to learn something that could prove useful, that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll show you during the fireworks. I’m correct in assuming you don’t care if you miss them?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Okay, but there are two conditions. One, this is our secret. You don’t tell anyone. Not even that I’m going to show you something during the fireworks. No one knows anything about this. Not your mom, not your friends. You tell no one. Agreed?”

“Not a word.”

“Two, this is a lesson. I want you to learn from this experience. This is not going to be about thrills and spectacle. You are going to learn. Do you understand me?”

“Okay.”

He nodded and smiled. “I’ll come get you just before the fireworks start.” A little conspiracy for two.