George, my uncle with the pencil-thin mustache

George, my uncle

with the pencil-thin mustache

Peter A. Hempel

  Table of contents

My Uncle George…
2.            Family background
3.            Nat
4.            George
5.            Onward through shot and shell…
6.            Fireworks
7.            Business ethics, according to George
8.            The secret phone
9.            The tag sale
10.        The car phone
11.        The auto dealership
12.        Real estate
13.        The speeding ticket
14.        They thought I was a doctor
15.        Exit Sylvia
16.        Jean (or is it Helen?)
17.        Skipping out on the tab
18.        The recliner
19.        The Yachting Cap
20.        Nat’s will, as made out by George
21.        It’s all taken care of
22.        Endgame
23.        Final revelations
24.        The funeral
25.        The will that wasn’t
26.        George the investor
27.        The apartments
28.        The rest of the story
29.        George’s Charm
30.        Epilogue
PS – Author’s final reflections

My uncle George…

My uncle George was probably the most selfish, self-centered person I have ever met.

I call him George because that was his real name, and I prefer to run his real name through the mud rather than a fake name.

I'm sometimes accused of being cynical or negative in my thinking. But I want to assure you from the outset that this story has a happy ending. George dies.

***

I did not always harbor such a dyspeptic view of George – quite the opposite in fact. He was tall and good looking, and had a big smile when he greeted you that made you feel special. He was the kind of person you would remember. He could have been an incredible politician.

When I was young, George was my favorite uncle, and I was always excited when he was going to come in for a family gathering.

A family gathering, in this case, consisted of my parents, me and my sister, and my mother’s[1] family – my grandfather and grandmother, uncle Nat, and George and his wife Sylvia. Neither Nat nor George had any children, so my sister and I were the only children at any of these gatherings.[2]

***

Family background

My grandfather and grandmother on my mother's side had emigrated from Ukraine to escape the pogroms. They had arrived in this country with virtually no money, and speaking no English. With the help of a Jewish settlement house, they both learned English, and my grandfather went on to eventually set up his own tailor shop. In his early days, he was quite radical politically; he was a member of the Wobblies (The Industrial Workers of the World) and edited the Yiddish page of its newsletter. Apparently his activity was enough to keep him in hiding from the authorities at times. He was an idealist who supported the idea of Esperanto as a universal language. And although he was an atheist, he strongly supported Jewish culture and the Jews in Israel.

My mother, Nat and George grew up in a household with little money, and at a time when anti-Semitism was rampant. They were also deeply affected, as almost everyone of their generation was, by the Great Depression.

All three of them managed to succeed in different ways.

My mother, who attended art school for a while but never went to college, married my father, an up-and-coming academic, and was able to use her intelligence, knowledge of art, and excellent taste in design to fit into academic circles and to support my father's career in many ways.

***

Nat

Nat, who never attended college, went into the Army during World War II and afterwards began a career as a tabloid journalist. When I was young, Nat was writing for The Police Gazette, a magazine that focused on crime and celebrity scandals, and specialized in the use of the word “shocking.” I remember seeing one “shocking” story in a copy at my barbershop about Elvis Presley autographing the breasts of a young female fan – although the accompanying photo had the standard black censor box keeping anything inappropriate from showing. It was that sort of magazine.

Interestingly, in the midst of this tabloid environment, my uncle also wrote a variety of articles about food issues, such as pesticides or the role of homogenized milk in increasing the rate of heart attacks.[3] In this, he followed the lead of my grandfather, who was a vegetarian and was interested in in health topics of all kinds. My sister, however, also remembered another aspect of these articles – each one would mention a different specific food that would pose a particular danger, but not the ingredient in them that was the culprit. That way, he could write article after article about essentially the same topic, just changing the specific food that contained it.

Nat was a fluent writer, able to write quickly on a wide range of topics for an audience that he related to very well. In fact, he was sure that standard language would someday catch up with him and his audience – e.g. “nite life” and other overdue spelling simplifications.

Nat was also well versed in backroom politics: long before it had become public knowledge, he would talk to us about Jack Kennedy's affairs, and say how the guys in the press corps referred to him as "Jack the Zipper."

In keeping with his old-school sensibilities, Nat would try to come on to the younger women at work, including French-kissing them in the office. This was before current sexual harassment laws, but finally it got so bad that the office manager had to talk to him and ask him to stop.

Eventually, Nat went on to become one of the top editors at Globe Communications, the company that produced The National Enquirer, Midnight Globe, and many other magazines that all of us have glanced through while waiting in the supermarket checkout line.

When Nat came to visit on his own, or with a girlfriend, he would always start asking us questions like, "Which of these would be the best headline? ‘10 Hot New Secrets to Make Your Bedroom Sizzle’? Or ‘6 Foods to Get Her in the Mood’? Or ‘Sex Scientist Reveals Shocking Secrets on How to Make the Hot Fun Last All Night for Both of You’?” Nat loved this stuff. Considering that his audience here was me and my sister, who were too young to be commenting on that sort of thing, and my parents, who were definitely not part of his readership, we weren’t the best focus group audience for his copy tests.

Although Nat was about as tall as my grandfather and George, his posture was slumped over, giving his clothes a perpetual rumpled look. He was also fond of cigars, and all in all, his manners and appearance left him looking uneducated and crude despite his genuine achievements.[4] He also had an ongoing predilection for blond alcoholics as girlfriends (including, until her death, the one-time movie star Veronica Lake, famous for her “peek-a-boo” hair style).

Nat had his quirks and flaws, but somewhere beneath all that he was genuinely kind and had a generous spirit.

George

Compared with Nat, George stood out. He always stood up straight, was well-dressed (although later on I realized the limitations of his taste in clothes, as well as in practically everything), and spoke in a way that gave you the impression that he was very smart and very wise (no accent to speak of). And of course, there was his pencil-thin mustache, a style note that he was obviously extremely fond of. Certainly none of my parents’ friends ever had a pencil-thin mustache, so it seemed quite exotic and glamorous to me.

What it came down to was that George exuded confidence – a trait that made people look to him and want to trust him. (It also happens to be an ideal trait for a confidence man.)

George was a lawyer and a CPA (more on that later). His wife Sylvia didn't seem to do much of anything at that point, although I'm told that when George was in law school, she helped support them by working as a milliner, which she was apparently quite skilled at. (I don't recall ever seeing my mother wear a hat of any sort, nor did any of the women in my parents’ social set.)

My mother had mentioned to me that when George was young, he had had polio and as a result one arm was somewhat shorter than the other, so he always wore long-sleeved shirts, and never rolled the sleeves up at all. I don't know whether polio left him sterile as well, or if he and Sylvia didn't have children for some other reason. For that matter, I have no idea what went into his marrying Sylvia. Sylvia’s family were Polish Jews. Sylvia managed to make herself into the worst stereotype of a Long Island/Miami Jew – her hair was dyed black, her lipstick line went far above her lip line, and she had an accent that could shatter glass. Both she and George had the kind of lower-middle class affectations that exemplify bad taste, while for some reason my mother had extraordinarily sophisticated taste in art, furniture, and pretty much everything else, and could spot important art trends before they entered the mainstream.

When George was dating Sylvia, my grandparents couldn't stand her, but for some reason he persisted. I have no idea what their marriage was like when I was young, but later on it certainly showed strains. I’m sure that under the circumstances, Sylvia never looked forward to family visits at our house, or for that matter any visits with any members of George’s family.

***

Onward through shot and shell…

So, back to when I was young and eagerly awaiting George's arrival at the family gathering…

George did enjoy talking to me, and was better at it than my grandfather ("How are you doing, young man?") or Nat. For one thing, George was very fond of asking questions of people. As I look back, I see also that this helped him keep from having to talk about himself, but for a young boy this was very exciting.[5]

One of the most impressive things about George was his ability to recite poetry from memory. I remember him dramatically reciting Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do & die,

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

And Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din”:

Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,

By the livin’ Gawd that made you,

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

This was great stuff for young boys, and I loved it. Looking back, I don't know if he knew any other poems. Also, given that his polio presumably exempted him from the draft, these are battle poems recited by someone who had never been there.

There’s a great passage in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in which young Portnoy describes his mother:

“It was my mother who could accomplish anything... And could a small child with my intelligence, with my powers of observation, doubt that this was so? She could make jello, for instance, with sliced peaches hanging in it, peaches just suspended there, in defiance of the law of gravity. She could bake a cake that tasted like a banana...”

So is it any surprise I was awed by George, with his moustache and his poetry and his elegant ways?

Another thing that I was always excited about when George arrived was that he would often bring me and my sister presents. I remember in one case when he brought me a flashy-looking watch with a gold watchband. The gold plating of course, was that totally cheesy stuff that began to flake off as soon as I began wearing it. So it was nice that George thought about bringing presents, but the real constant about them was that they were always cheap and shoddy.

***

Fireworks

Perhaps the incident from my childhood that sticks out most in my mind is when George came out one year around the Fourth of July. This was back in the early 50s, a time when life was significantly simpler. Fireworks were more of a do-it-yourself thing than an event to be attended. So my friends and I would get standard firecrackers and sparklers and the black pellets you would light and they would turn into black snakes, and we would go out with our firecrackers and matches and have a wonderful time setting them off whenever and wherever we wanted. One of our favorite things was to take a small 6-ounce can that had held frozen lemonade or orange juice, and put a firecracker under it and light it. When the firecracker went off, the can would go flying up in the air, which in pre-TV days was great entertainment.

Although we had moved to North Haven, a suburb of New Haven where my father taught at Yale, my father never learned to drive. My mother had learned to drive out of necessity when we moved there, but she was 35 at the time and was always a nervous driver with hands held rigidly at 10:00 and 2:00 on the steering wheel at all times. Of course neither of my parents knew the first thing about fireworks. So as far as counting on them to take me to the fireworks stand, that was not in the cards. I remember one year when the father of one of my friends gave me a bag of fireworks for myself after they had gone shopping and how grateful I was not to be left out.

But now, when George visited, he was happy to take me to the fireworks stand on our own. Wow!

Not only could I finally get plenty of standard firecrackers and the usual stuff, George took it to the next level. He asked the clerk if he had any M-80's. The clerk said, "I'm sorry sir, but those are illegal." George then said to him, "I didn't ask whether they were legal, I asked if you had any." The clerk went back to the back of the stand and came out with some M-80's. M-80’s, also known as "depth charges," consisted of a short cylinder of silver cardboard packed inside with gunpowder, and with a red fuse sticking out of the side of the cylinder[6].

George's knowledge of these exotic fireworks, along with his obvious disregard of the law, it was like having an uncle who was a made man in the mob.

Later on, when I was running around with my friends, I got one of those large 32-ounce tomato cans and took it out in the backyard and put an M-80 under it. For some reason, I also decided to put a largish rock on top of the can. Well, when the M-80 went off, it blew the rock 2 feet or so into the air, and blew the can itself to pieces. Fortunately, my friends and I had retreated a good distance and we were all fine. But as I look back, was that really the smartest thing to do? Give an 8-year-old boy a bunch of M-80’s and tell him to have fun?

***

After that, I don’t remember any specific continuum of observations, just a series of stories and events…

When George was in college, the story went, he set up shop in a small appliance store repairing appliances and fixing up gadgets. My grandfather had been something of a tinkerer as well, and my mother remembered their having the first radio among their friends in the neighborhood. According to his own telling, George did so well with his repair business, he eventually bought out the shop owner. But I never saw any evidence of that. He did have a love of gadgets and continued to buy cheap gadgets (radios in futuristic Jetsons kinds of shapes, that sort of thing), but he never went high-end – no flat-screen TVs or high-end stereo equipment. In fact, later on he resolutely refused to have a laptop computer (I don’t know if he even knew how to use any computer), and refused my mother’s gift of an answering machine (which she wanted him to have to make it easier to get in touch with him).

***

Business ethics, according to George

On one visit to George on Long Island, George was talking to my mother and me about ways to make money. If, for example, you were in a position to decide which bank to put a client’s money in, he explained, the bank officer would offer you a kickback to choose his bank. So, George went on, “I don’t need a million dollars, I just want power of attorney over a million dollars.”

My mother, who was old-fashioned in her views on this kind of thing, was obviously appalled, as was I. But George thought this was just fine and dandy – his client would still be getting the same interest, so what was the harm?

I don’t know for sure what his specialty was as an accountant, but I suspect it had to do with off-shore accounts and tax evasion. Many years later, in fact, he did mention having helped clients set up elaborate off-shore shell companies, and said he felt deeply ashamed about that. But I never saw even a hint of shame or morality or ethics in anything he ever did. Nor did he suggest any way in which he might have tried to make amends.

***

The secret phone

My mother was the oldest child in the family, and George was the youngest, so she felt especially protective of him. She always had an intense and romanticized idea of family, and willingly – or willfully – overlooked anything bad about him that I or my sister might try to point out.

One time my mother was driving us to visit George and Sylvia on Long Island. She got lost someplace along the way and wanted to be able to stop and call George from a pay phone, but she couldn’t remember his number and didn’t have it written down.

Plus, it was unlisted.

This was before unlisted numbers became more common, but what was odder still was that this was a secret unlisted phone number – even Sylvia didn’t know it.

I was still young at the time, maybe 12 or 13, so I did not immediately leap to the kinds of suspicions that would be top of mind today. Yes, he was a bit of a nut in terms of privacy, but hiding his number from his wife?

This was not George the Trustworthy, this was George with the pencil-thin mustache.

My mother, of course, made no further comment and somehow we found our way to their house.

***

The tag sale

When George and Sylvia moved from their house on Long Island to a high-rise closer in, they held a moving sale. (My wife Jan made the mistake of referring to it as a “yard sale,” and Sylvia quickly corrected her – “It’s not a yard sale, it’s a tag sale.” She was quite huffy about it. Class matters in things like this, even as she and George kept an eagle eye out for anyone trying to switch price tags or steal anything from them.)

My mother told me that George had invited me and Jan to come out and see if there was anything we wanted. He would enjoy the idea of our having some of the stuff they no longer had room for. Jan and I had very little money at the time, so the offer sounded good to us and we made the long drive out there. What my mother didn’t tell us – and he probably didn’t tell her – was that this was day 3 of a 3-day sale. Anything remotely valuable was already sold. Essentially George was offering us a chance to carry away the leftovers. Not that, given their taste, there would have been much of interest anyway, it was just the utterly tacky cheapness of the way he went about the whole thing that blew our minds.

***

The car phone

Then there was the time that my mother invited George and Sylvia to Thanksgiving dinner. She invited them to get here by 1:00 or so, and everything was ready to go around that time. Except George and Sylvia. It is, of course, a long schlep to Princeton from Long Island, and traffic on the Belt Parkway is unpredictable, so being a little late is understandable. My mother (known as Grandma since the arrival of Jan’s and my two daughters) was bustling about the kitchen, keeping busy, and the rest of us were getting hungry. Still no George. An hour passed. My mother began to be irritated and frustrated, but soon she turned to worry instead – she was now convinced that they had been in some horrific accident and were dead on the highway somewhere.

Now two hours had passed with no word of any sort. The turkey and stuffing and vegetables were getting cold. My young daughters were very hungry and tired of waiting. But, of course, we couldn’t start without George.

Finally, three hours late, they pulled into the driveway. George explained how they had gotten stuck in terrible traffic. My mother was greatly relieved at their arrival, and was ready to enjoy a festive family gathering. But then, even before we had a chance to sit down at the table, gadget George began bragging about his latest toy, a battery-operated car phone. By today’s standards, of course, it was a clunker, a headset attached to a battery pack only slightly smaller than a car battery, but at the time, this was hot stuff.

I know what you’re thinking as you’re reading this – the same thing we were thinking. And then Jan was indelicate enough to ask why he didn’t actually use this great new device to call from the road and tell us what was going on and where he and Sylvia were. Well, George murmured, trying to get away from the subject, the car phone was in the trunk, so he couldn’t get to it while they were driving. Then he quickly announced that because of all the time he had spent on the drive down, they could only stay a short time. So they picked at a few things, and no more than 25 minutes from when they arrived, they were in their car again, heading home, leaving the rest of us with a Thanksgiving experience that keeps on giving in all our memories.

***

The auto dealership

At some point, George became a partner in a Pontiac dealership somewhere (I never knew where). He suggested that if I ever wanted, I could come by and he would give me a good deal on a car. Now, of course, I realize how little this offer meant. Later, in a moment of extremely rare candor, George confessed to my mother that that was the only business deal he had ever lost money in. (Insert skepticism here.)

***

Real estate

George was great at setting up deals for other people to invest in. At one point he told me about some deal he set up in the Miami area for a group of investors. He went down, scoped out potential properties, and worked out all the details. At first I assumed he had been one of the investors, but now I realize he never would have done that. He was not ready to take any risks whatsoever with his own money. Did the investors do okay? I don’t know. But I do know George’s taste. He had a great eye for properties that would appeal to elderly Jews.

On the other hand, on a later occasion my sister had spotted a great investment property in Chelsea in New York. It was a townhouse in an area where property values were beginning to rise, and it had the potential for a real upside. My sister had a genuinely good eye for real estate and property trends, and had always done well with her own homes and with a house she and her second husband had bought, rehabbed themselves, and flipped.

My sister approached George to see if he would lend her some money, in the neighborhood of $20,000 or so, to help buy it. Not chump change to be sure, but hardly daunting for someone in George’s bracket.

George was not interested. Not at all. He didn’t want to say “no” outright, so he just insisted that she should be looking at something in the East 60s instead, which would be much more of a sure thing. (Also unaffordable, since the prices there had already risen.)

Sure enough, my sister’s predictions were right on the mark, and the property she was looking at is worth millions today.[7]

***

The speeding ticket

When I was younger, George used to take pride in having cool cars. At one point he had a Studebaker Avanti, whose style made it look years ahead of the standard, big-box offerings of the Big 3. After that, he bought a Buick convertible with a black body and a flashy red interior.

The Buick had a feature where you could select a certain speed and when you exceeded that speed you would hear a warning buzz. George set the buzzer for 10 miles an hour over the speed limit, and I remember being in the car with him on the highway and hearing the buzzer going off uninterruptedly.

On one visit to us, he regaled us with the story of what happened when a cop pulled him over for speeding. George was undaunted, and was able to totally beat the cop in court by asking how he could know his radar thing was accurate if both cars were moving, etc.

It's not that all of us wouldn't be happy to get out of a ticket, both for the fine itself and more especially to avoid an increase in our insurance rates, but we would know we had been in the wrong. George was gleeful. He had outwitted and humiliated this poor cop, and he had gotten away with something yet again. He was the Teflon George.

In later years in Florida, his driving style would be to cruise along, looking over and talking to his passengers while weaving down the road, totally disregarding the other cars ahead of and around him. After all, he was George.

***

They thought I was a doctor

One of George’s clients in his accounting practice was Franklin Hospital, a local area hospital. George was over there frequently and knew many of the administrators and some of the medical staff.

One day there was a group of doctors standing around discussing some patient’s diagnosis. George, who was fascinated by medical stuff, joined the group to listen. At one point one of them apparently said something to him along the lines of, “What do you think, doctor?”

That made George’s day. He couldn’t stop telling us that story and saying, “They thought I was a doctor! Can you believe that? They thought I was a doctor!”

I guess for George, a Jewish boy who grew up in a culture where becoming a doctor was the epitome of success, having someone think he was a doctor was pretty much as good as the real thing. After all, he was already faking pretty much everything else.

***

Exit Sylvia

Sylvia, as I may have suggested earlier, wasn’t the most pleasant of people. On one visit to George and Sylvia’s house, my mother and Sylvia had a major argument. I know George was aware of it, but just sat out on the patio with me and my sister and tried to just ignore it. My mother had long held the view that somehow Sylvia had held George back from becoming something more in life, although I can’t really imagine what. He turned out exactly as he always was, from beginning to end. Much later, as per usual, my mother revised all of that and claimed that Sylvia had had some good points. Oy vey.

Anyway, many years later, George and Sylvia had bought a condo down in Hollywood, FL, just north of Miami Beach. They never stayed long on any visit, but at one point when they were down there Sylvia became very ill and fell into a coma. The doctors told George there was no hope, but he refused to accept that. Convinced that the only really good medical care was to be found in New York, he had them keep her on life support and had her flown up by medical helicopter to one of the New York hospitals. There the doctors offered the same prognosis and suggested that he let them pull the plug. George refused, and she was kept alive with extreme measures for many weeks in this same vegetative coma. George even called me at one point, and explained, “You have to have hope, don’t you?”

Well hope wasn’t enough, and Sylvia passed on. It hit George very hard in spite of how awful she was and his many transgressions against her. I’m sure my mother went to the funeral – for me it wasn’t on a need-to-go basis.

***

Jean (or is it Helen?)

At some point after Sylvia’s drawn-out death[8], George began seeing a woman named Jean. Or Helen. She went by both names at different times, although I have no idea what that was all about.

George had first met Jean when she had worked at his office in the past. He told my mother that Jean had been “a great gal,” really excellent at her job. I have no idea whether there was any truth to this. For a long time I also assumed that this meant that she had been an accountant in his office, but my sister suggested that she had probably just been a secretary.

Jean was a talker. Which was easy, since she had an opinion on everything. And it was much better than your opinion. She knew exactly what books you must read, and what movies you must see – even if, as it turned out, she had neither read nor seen them herself. She had taken art lessons at some point, and loved to talk about how many months the teacher made them spend just practicing how to draw a line. And after taking a cruise ship and group tour of Egypt and the Middle East, she began going around giving lectures on the situation in the Middle East to whatever groups would put up with her.

Jean had a son, who when I met him must have been in his 60s, with grey hair and walking with a cane. He claimed to have been involved in some way with documentary film-making. I’m not sure, but I have a strong feeling he may have been living at home with Jean. He and George spent much time talking together, and apparently bonded over their mutually held view that software patents were wrong, that you shouldn’t be able to patent software. I know for sure that George’s view would have been adamantly the reverse if he had actually been involved in creating any software himself. It was a very strange notion.

Jean had had an acrimonious divorce from her former husband. So much so, that she refused to allow her (grown) son to ever see him. And when his father died, she forbade him from attending the funeral – and he allowed her to do so.

Jean did introduce George to many new things; they traveled down to Virginia together to visit some civil war battlefields, and somehow George now found himself fascinated by the civil war. My mother, always eager to please, bought him some large and expensive book about civil war history, which I’m certain George never even opened.

Jean also traveled down to Florida with him. Am I cynical to think that what she really wanted was to check out the value of his condo?

Jean became a presence at family gatherings when George came. Would we have swapped for Sylvia instead if that had been an option? Tough call. Very close vote. Counting the chads on that one.

In their relationship, Jean was relentless, with her eye on the prize. Which was marrying George and having access to all his money.

At one point Jean explained to all of us that she was looking for a new place to live, someplace with more room than where she was living. She had some grandiose expectations about how much space she would need, and my sister and Jan and I all wondered exactly how she expected to pay for it. Eventually she ended up with a townhouse in NJ, much more modest than her grand plans, but I’m quite sure that she managed to squeeze a chunk of the money for it (or even all of it?) out of George.

My mother would tell me about how George would call her to complain about Jean and how she was driving him crazy. Since my mother was no fan of Jean, this fit with her own feelings and I’m sure she felt that George was bothered by Jean’s over-the-top obnoxiousness. But I’m also sure the only thing about Jean that drove George crazy was her constant efforts to get him to sign money over to her.

Jean was always eager to remind us how close they were. At one point she coyly said something to the effect that they might “have something to announce to us soon.” The only problem with her plan was George.

Jean was an unstoppable force; George was an immovable object. A cosmic relationship. A black hole.

***

Skipping out on the tab

One of George’s most impressive qualities was his resolute ability to look the other way when the check arrived. He was not quite in a position to literally run out the door or climb out the men’s room window (he would have loved doing that, and would have bragged about it afterwards), but in the awkward wait to see who would pick up the check he never, ever blinked first.

For example, after he had sold his practice to a set of younger accountants, he continued to maintain a (rent-free) office there. During tax season when people were working hard and late, they would all chip in and order in pizza or other food. George was always happy to eat his share, but he never chipped in a single dime to help pay for it.

At one point when I was job hunting, my mother suggested that I meet with George to get his advice. So Jan and I took the train into NYC to meet him. The problem was, of course, that George had no insights and no leads to offer. Basically most of the discussion consisted of his repeating how New York was a “different dollah.” Thanks, George. And for all of my mother’s fanfare about “talking to George,” he never even offered to take us out to lunch.

When my grandfather turned 90, we held a family gathering at a delicatessen restaurant in Miami. (My grandfather had retired to Miami, Nat was living there, and George had bought a condo there; for the rest of us it meant flying down and paying for hotel rooms.) At the end of the meal, Nat picked up the check, then on the way out somehow got George, who was dripping with reluctance, to chip in half.

My grandfather’s funeral? After the service (conducted by a local rent-a-rabbi, who knew nothing about my grandfather or any of us), we went back to my grandfather’s small apartment with Lillian, his second wife and now widow, and various family members, including a few cousins. I remember very specifically George regaling one of his less well-off cousins with tales of the interest rate he was getting on jumbo CDs ($100,000+, at a time when that was a lot of money). Nat was sitting a seat or two over and asked Lillian what the funeral had cost. She reluctantly told him $14,000, which for someone living on social security was an astronomical amount. Nat immediately reached for his wallet, and wrote her a check for $14,000, saying, “If you can’t pay for your own father’s funeral, what’s money worth?” George, who obviously couldn’t have missed any of this, and with the rest of us now looking on, said not a word, and never volunteered to chip in a penny.

When my mother turned 80, George came out for lunch. We went to Charlie’s Uncle, a local middle-brow restaurant. The food was okay, and things went fine. When the check arrived, we were all interested to see what George would do.

George did nothing. After a slightly awkward pause, my mother, who had already established herself as the person who picked up the check (a role which her “friends” came to abuse most egregiously), picked up the check. She was obviously disappointed, but given her fierce loyalty towards George no matter what, she never complained about it to us afterward.

On a similar occasion, perhaps my mother’s 85^th birthday, same restaurant, George and Jean again came in to celebrate with us. This time, however, to my astonishment, when the check came, George immediately reached for it, and said, “Let me take care of this.” I was impressed. Maybe an old, and totally cheap, dog can learn a new trick.

That is until I talked to Jan later on. She and one of my daughters had gone to the ladies room and while they were in there, Jan was complaining loudly to my daughter about how cheap George was. Apparently while she was in the middle of this, Jean walked in and heard them. I’m sure that she went out an alerted George afterwards. “Good deed” my ass.

***

The recliner

When my grandfather retired, he and his second wife moved to Miami Beach to get away from the cold winters of New York. They were living, I’m sure, just on their social security, but they managed to find a modest apartment in a small complex that probably had many other retirees in similar circumstances.

My mother and my father used to send them small amounts of money to help out. At one point my mother got the idea that my grandfather would enjoy having a reclining chair to relax in, and thought it would be nice to have it as a gift from all of the children. She called Nat, and he was happy to join in.

Then she called George. I don’t know what it took, but it took a lot. To get him to chip in on buying a reclining chair for his father who was nearly 90 and living in a tiny apartment.

I don’t remember how my mother put it to me. I believe the phrase “a little reluctant” was part of it.

My grandfather loved that chair. He sat in it every day. He even died while taking a nap in that chair. Thanks, George.

***

The Yachting Cap

George loved to see himself as connected with the sea. The summer after I graduated from high school I went out to visit him and Sylvia for a few days on Long Island. George was very excited to take me out on his boat.

His boat? It turned out to be a rowboat, with a tiny outboard motor. The kind of thing you’d use for fishing. Perfectly enjoyable, but after all of his talk about it, somehow short of even my limited expectations.

Over the years he continued his fascination with boating, and Florida gave him a chance to up his game. Jean used to love to talk about how much George loved sailing. Color me cynical, but I can’t see him knowing anything at all about sailboats, and not much about anything larger than his original rowboat. Sailing is complicated and physically demanding, and takes a lot of time and dedication to master.

I can certainly imagine George enjoying going out on a boat piloted by someone else, whether a client or someone he hired. Later, after he died, we found some electronic equipment that looked as if it might have been navigational aids or something, but if you have to take it home with you at night it’s not a big boat. And there was no indication of his having owned a boat of any sort.

Whatever the reality, George used this idea as an excuse to begin wearing a yachting cap – white, with lots of gold braid (think Gavin MacLeod in The Love Boat) – everywhere, including when we went out to a restaurant in Princeton. He obviously thought it made him look quite dapper and distinguished. In his world, where he masqueraded as a lawyer and a CPA, where it was all about appearance rather than reality, it was an appropriate capstone.

For all the rest of us, however, it made him look like an idiot.

***

Nat’s will, as made out by George

Some years after my grandfather’s death, Nat developed cancer.

Perhaps spurred on by his illness, he invited me and Jan and our daughters to come down to Florida for a vacation visit. We stayed in his two-bedroom apartment in Ft. Lauderdale in a high-rise building on the beach; he was living, all expenses paid by Globe, in a bungalow at the Boca Raton Hotel where all housekeeping was taken care of and he could order food from room service any time, day or night.

His own apartment, where we were staying, was nice as well, with a huge living room and the biggest closet in the master bedroom I’ve ever seen – forget walk-in, this was a jog-in closet. (I still have dreams about that closet. Why do all other builders hate closet space?)

It was a great visit. To hit the beach all we had to do was take the elevator downstairs. At first our daughters, who were fairly young, wanted no part of the ocean, it was way too big. They preferred playing in the sand well up on the beach. Eventually however, after Jan and I had spent enough time floating around, we scooped them up and carried them down to the water and they began to have a good time.

There were lots of other fun things to do there, but one of the most interesting trips was a visit to the Globe headquarters. The Globe empire was a pretty big deal, encompassing not only the venerable National Enquirer, but The Star, The Midnight Globe, and numerous other types of publications, and Nat was Managing Editor for the whole shebang. The corporate headquarters was a large office building in Boca Raton in a lush setting surrounded by palm trees and bright plants.

The top floor was where they had their executive meeting rooms and official offices for top executives. The décor included executive dark wood along with a mix of classical Japanese art and sculptures by Frederic Remington, the American artist who specialized in paintings and sculptures of the old West. It was an unlikely combination but it actually was very well done and came off as very sophisticated.

The real magazine work was done on the other, more utilitarian, floors. They had one room with all four walls lined from top to bottom with covers of different issues of their magazines, with appropriate living and dead celebrities and shocked and scandalous headlines. Each one also had a tape across it with the number of copies that that issue sold. (Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis were overrepresented, and were consistent best sellers.)

We had a good time seeing Nat and appreciated his inviting us down. He liked us, and was sentimental about “the little girlies.”

His cancer was already well along when we saw him, and within another six months he was facing the end. So, what did he do?

He called George, his trusted brother, to help him write a will. Nat was obviously ready to leave money to me and Jan and the girls (especially to help with college), as well as my sister and my mother of course. He also wanted to leave money to his girlfriend, the latest in his parade of alcoholic blondes.

George did his best to straighten all of that out. Nat managed to insist that his condo go to his girlfriend, along with some money. Outside of that, Jan and I and my sister and mother got token amounts. The bulk of the estate was to go to some random college or hospital in Florida to which Nat had no connection whatever. For some reason, George would do anything rather than see money go to other family members who might remember Nat’s generosity with fondness and gratitude.

George, on the other hand, was the trustee for the estate, which allowed him to collect a tidy fee for himself along the way.

When Nat died, his girlfriend immediately went to the condo and had the locks changed. This fact was indignantly reported by George, who spent a great deal of the estate’s money trying to sue her and keep her from getting anything at all. Smart girl. She knew what George was like, and moved first.

***

It’s all taken care of

My sister and I were not happy about all this, and we were also concerned about what George would do in his will when he died. My mother was also very eager to have George leave something substantial for us in his will, but hadn’t been willing to actually say anything to him.

George was not someone for whom hints would do anything.

Finally, my sister and I pushed my mother harder on this, pointing out that given his history, he wouldn’t leave us anything at all. So she rather timidly broached the subject with him.

He immediately reassured her: “Don’t worry, it’s all taken care of.” That was plenty for my mother, but my sister and I remained much more skeptical.

***

Endgame

As happens to all of us, George finally found himself at the table with the one opponent who wouldn’t blink first – death.

George was always terrified of death, as his behavior with Sylvia showed. Along with that was a total refusal, despite having had a hospital as a client for many years, to see a doctor about anything.

So, when he began to develop stomach pains and a swelling of the abdomen, he ignored it. And when the pain got worse and the swelling got bigger, he ignored it resolutely. Jean later told us that at times he would have to unbuckle his belt when they were driving because it was so painful.

After this had been going on for nearly a year, it finally got to a point where he couldn’t ignore it any longer. My mother and sister rushed over to see him at Jean’s house. My mother reported that George looked to be in awful shape, and she was very upset.

Before going to a hospital, however, George had one final errand to run. He and Jean went to visit George’s lawyer to make out a will.

Make out a will? Now? WTF?

Jean, of course, accompanied him on this visit, doubtless never giving George a moment alone with the lawyer. Of course, as she explained it, “I didn’t even know what they were saying, I was too busy making notes.”

George gave the lawyer the basics of the will, and his lawyer said he would have it ready for him to sign in a day or two. George, I’m sure, indicated that this was not a rush, since he had no intention of dying anyway.

The next day George checked into the Princeton Hospital. The doctors tried to explain to him how bad his condition was, but George had the idea that his next step would be to go to the Mayo Clinic where they had the best doctors and would cure him. In the meantime, however, he stayed in the hospital.

My mother called me from the hospital and asked me to come over. By the time I got there, George was already on a heavy morphine drip. If you know anything about a morphine drip, you know once it starts you’re not going to have much of a conversation with the person.

Jean was frantic. She kept going out to another room to call the lawyer to tell him to rush down so George could sign the will. He kept telling her he would come down the next morning when George was more awake and could sign it then. During all these calls, Jean would loudly insist that we leave the room or not come in: “Privileged conversation!”

Jean was frantic, my mother was very sad and upset. As for me, I felt a little like the day I was working at Planned Parenthood of New York City and heard the news that Reagan had been shot: slightly curious about the outcome, but it wasn’t anything to get upset about.

In American Werewolf in London, one character talks about being trapped in limbo with other dead people: “Have you ever tried talking to a corpse? It's boring.” Well, hanging around the bedside of someone zoned out on morphine is boring too. So, having hung around the drama for a while, I was worried about work and made a quick trip home to check my email and bring back my laptop.

By the time I got back, George was dead. I don’t think I missed much. As a woman I knew who had worked as a nurse in ER once told me, “I’ve seen people die. Death is actually kind of a non-event. They’re there and then they’re not.” Especially when they’re on a morphine drip.

Leaving aside how upset my mother was, the interesting final fact in all of this was: George had managed to die without leaving a will.

Some people might find it surprising. A lawyer, who knew all about wills?

But I didn’t. I did find it poetic. But also obvious…

Fear and greed.

Fear of death, and even thinking about death. So making out a will? Just say no. No, no, no. And so much greed he could never bring himself to come up with and sign a document that gave any of his money to anyone else anyway.

Good job, George. You stayed true to yourself right to the end.

Jean must have been screaming inside, but what could she say? Especially to any of us? Like watching your winning lottery ticket get blown away by the wind.

Many years earlier I had been talking with George and he told me rather enthusiastically, “You know what I’m going to do with my money? I’m going to give it all away and just enjoy watching people spend it all.” He was talking, I assume, about institutions rather than actual people, so I wasn’t quite as cheerful about all this as he seemed to be. On the other hand, with George, not to worry.

***

Final revelations

Whatever George’s accomplishments, no newspaper, not even a local paper, bothered doing an obituary. As for a “hometown” paper, what does “hometown” mean for someone living in an anonymous middle-brow condo development in the strip mall suburbs of Long Island?

Jean wrote out a paid death notice for the Times. Not much to work with, not much to say.

On the other hand, outside the realm of standard obituary copy, there was quite a bit of entertaining stuff. You think you know someone. But wait until they die and see what else you find out.

In the case of George what we found out came in various forms – his funeral, his lawyer, onsite in his condo on Long Island and his condo in Florida, and in the office of his former accounting firm, where the saga of his professional life unfolded.

Because George died intestate, my mother became the beneficiary of his estate, and my sister and I took on the job of handling the many details.

***

The funeral

First, of course, there was the immediate matter of getting George embalmed and encrypted. These arrangements he had (somewhat surprisingly) dealt with in advance, probably when dealing with Sylvia’s funeral.

Jewish tradition dictates that the coffin be a plain pine box, and forbids embalming. None of that was permanent enough for George. He was thoroughly embalmed and his casket was one of the usual shiny wood and brass jobs that funeral homes love to sell. Embalmed George looked just zombie-ish enough to almost serve as a metaphor of some sort, but I’m sure I’m overreaching on this point.

Although he was an enthusiast of boats while he was alive, George was not about to risk letting in any water once he was dead. His coffin was put into the other half of a dual slot in a mausoleum in a sprawling cemetery on Long Island, where he and Sylvia rest chemically preserved above the water line for all eternity, or until the next highway project comes through.

My only regret is that they forgot his yachting cap – it would have been so fitting as he set sail for Valhalla.

At the funeral I don’t remember any service as such. Rather, people were invited to share their reminiscences about George. Although people from the complex where he lived, and colleagues from his accounting firm and the hospital he had worked with showed up, no one had fond stories to share, or much of anything at all to say. Only my sister made the effort to say a few words, so it ended after a somewhat embarrassingly short time.

My sister and I to this day thank our lucky stars that no cryogenics salesman had found George ahead of time. Forget embalming. His body, or at least his head, would be now deep frozen in some desert somewhere, with all his assets locked up in an account for him when he emerged in 100 years or so when medical science could cure him and he could return to being his old, old self.

***

The will that wasn’t

Although Jean missed out on the main prize, she did not leave empty-handed. Aside from her house that he probably paid for, she had been able to get George to sign over a very sizable IRA account and one of his bank accounts. She also got him to sign a very large check to her son, probably the day before he went into the hospital.

The lawyer, the one who had said he would come down with the will the next day, later told me and my sister a little about what George had said he wanted to do. A chunk of money would go to Jean, a considerably smaller amount to my mother. No mention at all of me or my sister. And the rest was to go to… Well, to charity. But George couldn’t think of any charity that he actually cared about. Just anything rather than family. It was obvious that the lawyer had been put off by Jean and had the sense she was trying to push this through, although he wasn’t the kind who moved all that fast anyway.

The lawyer also told us that a few days after George’s death, another woman called him to find out about the will. Apparently George had had some kind of relationship with this woman, and had…I know you’re getting way ahead of me on this one… promised to take care of her and her daughter in his will.

***

George the investor

My mother had always held up George to us as an expert on all matters of business and finance. At one point she showed him the statements from a brokerage account that she and my father had with a private broker. George looked at them solemnly and told her that the broker had “made some good picks.” Some bad as well, but who’s counting? My mother was immensely reassured.

Well, as it turned out, looking through his finances, George had never bought a single share of stock in his life. He was way too risk-averse to ever consider anything where he might lose any of his money. So, while other people might have been able to turn the money he made into a lot of money, George’s vision was so constricted by greed, fear and paranoia that he just sat there, leaving it in cash or putting money into CDs when the rates were good.

***

The apartments

As I have mentioned earlier, George had two condos, one on Long Island and one in Hollywood, Florida, just north of Miami Beach. In Long Island the condo we saw was the downsized version. He had begun by buying a two-bedroom apartment for himself and Sylvia, and after her death sold it and bought a cheaper one-bedroom condo instead. I’m not sure whether he had done something similar in Florida.

In both cases, the apartments were cluttered – the condo on Long Island more so because it was smaller and he spent more time there and had been accumulating stuff longer. It wasn’t the clutter itself that was so bad, it was the utter lack of taste in everything. In Florida, for example, he had purchased lots of art to cover the walls, but it was all K-Mart crap – fake African paintings and sculptures, along with other stuff that was not “African” but was just as bad.

I grew up in a home where books were everywhere. Even now, bookshelves are my most prominent furniture. George? Not so much. One or two books by Rush Limbaugh and not much of anything else I can remember.

George had once told me that he had begun “collecting jade.” I.e. buying jade figures and ornaments. Unless you are a connoisseur with a sophisticated eye, that kind of thing is truly a fool’s game; you might as well buy the collectible plates they advertise in the Sunday papers and wait for the value to go up.

In any case, there was no sign of any jade anything. But there were collections. Lots of them. Magnifying glasses from the Dollar Store – 6 of them, all identical. Carabiner keychains by the dozen, in all different sizes. Packs of junk notepads. And on and on.

George always loved cheap crap. Now, with the rise of the Dollar Store he had found heaven for the cheapskate shopaholic and hoarder.

Similar collections in both apartments. Plus tons of clothes. Dozens and dozens of suit jackets and sports jackets and slacks – all cheap and tacky polyester stuff – hanging neatly in the closet. The hanging bar in one closet simply collapsed under the weight while I was there. And even more dozens of shirts on shelves still folded from the laundry or simply never opened at all, with the store price tags still on them.

George had once appeared at our house with Jean in a brand new, sporty-looking tiny jeep-style car from a Japanese manufacturer. He proudly told us the story about how he was just driving by the dealership, spotted the car in the lot, and went in and bought it, just like that. We were truly in the presence of a wild and crazy guy. But after his death, the only cars we saw or found any record of were old-model American cars, devoid of any style or interest, and pretty much junkers at best. Curious and curiouser.

***

The rest of the story

The final part of the story came to us largely through the accountant who was working on the estate finances. He and his partner had bought out George’s practice many years earlier and the firm was now quite successful.

The accountant  was very impressed with George’s absolute brilliance in accounting strategies. At the same time, however, he told us that in fact George never passed the bar and was therefore not actually a lawyer, and had never passed the CPA exam either, so he also wasn’t a CPA. Oops.

I had heard earlier that George’s first job was with KPMG or one of the other big accounting firms, but that after a while he went off on his own. The accountant filled us in from there. When George started out he was very good at bringing in clients. He hired one accountant and pretty much worked him to death, being way too cheap to hire anyone else. I don’t know how big the firm got under George, but I imagine that this kind of penny pinching would have kept him from hiring adequate staff and placed a real limit on growing the firm’s practice.

As part of the sale, as is usual in such cases, George was to stick around and help with clients through the transition period. The contract gave him an office for five years, after which time it was expected that he would leave. Surprise! George never left. And it had been a lot of years. The new partners could never figure out a way to broach the issue with him, or to suggest that he might want to start paying some rent, so he stayed on, paying nothing, like a rerun of the old film, The Man Who Came to Dinner[9].

There was more, of course. Sylvia was never allowed to visit the office. Perhaps one reason was that George had persuaded the partners to give his mistress[10] a job in the office.

***

What struck me was that as the accountant told us these stories, his tone was bemused rather than indignant – to him George was “a strange guy,” an enigma rather than simply an asshole. The accountant was a man who knew contracts and was meticulous about them. He never hesitated to remind a client about an overdue bill. But when it came to talking to George about the simple matter of perhaps paying rent for his office after his contract expired, he couldn’t do it. That was the power that George had. When you act self-confident in whatever you do and are utterly oblivious to awkwardness, it’s like having a super power. Who needs to leap tall buildings when you can just...be George?

***

George’s Charm

If you had met George, chances are you would have found him charming. With his good looks, his air of confidence, and his big smile, why not? Moreover, rather than talk about himself, he would ask about what you did, and would want to know more. With me, for example, he would ask how one would go about doing a poll. And when I would tell him about the strategy of writing a questionnaire and telephone polling (this was before the internet took over), he would sit there with a look of deep astonishment and say, “Faaascinating. Just faaascinating.” And you would sit there basking in the glow of having illuminated some vast mystery, and feeling pretty damn faaascinating yourself.

It wasn’t until you looked back that you would see any of this, and most people never did, never did put any of the pieces together. It reminds me of the down-home pose used so successfully by southern politicians. Unlike yuppie easterners, who revel in macho tales of endless workweeks and high-stakes pressure, these good ol’ boys seem humbled by the complexity and difficulty of even the simplest tasks.

It wasn’t that George was acting befuddled, he was merely seeming very interested. And you would go away feeling very good about yourself, and having learned nothing about him.

***

Epilogue

Some people say that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But why not? Who better, for that matter? They’re dead anyway. It’s not like they’re going to cause a scene, or sue you, or cut you out of their will.

But still, I can’t quite avoid that nagging voice in my head that keeps reminding me to be fair and balanced. So I showed this to my sister. And at the end, she said to me, “This is very true and very funny. But didn’t George have any redeeming qualities?” She paused and thought. Then she concluded, “Well, I guess the fact that I can’t think of any off-hand probably tells us something.”

***

PS – Author’s final reflections

What is most fascinating to me is how much I learned while writing this story – not so much the details, but beginning to see and understand the essence of the con man, how someone can keep people from asking the obvious questions.

One of the interesting things to my mind is how small a scale con men operate on. It’s hard, unless you are a truly gifted con man like Ronald Reagan, to make this work on a large scale. Even Bernie Madoff, for all the hundreds of millions he stole, operated on a retail level – one dupe at a time. George certainly was smart – even I grant him that. But his vision was small. It was about, how do I get away with things? And I suspect that this carried over to what he offered his clients as well – tricks for tax evasion.

With a larger vision, George could have done a lot more than he did. He could have had a life that warranted an obituary that didn’t have to be paid for by the word. And even on the crasser side, he could have made far more money.

George was very good, probably even brilliant, at tax law, and I’m sure he did a great job of creating offshore tax shelters and other tax dodges. But he didn’t seem to be able to look beyond the scam. I don’t know how big his company became while he was leading it, but I suspect it was not that large, in no small measure because of his cheapness. He never would have wanted to pay enough to get really good people. The two men who bought his practice from him had grown it into a solid accounting company – not a major player, but a respectable firm. Again, think Madoff. He never grew a firm, he just grew a scam.

But what both George and Madoff could do, and do brilliantly, was communicate confidence. And in a scary and risky world, we are drawn to confidence like gullible moths.

It’s odd. My mother was wholly blind to all of this because of her sentimental vision of her younger brother and the financially constrained life they had all grown up in. In other comparable situations, she was always wary and suspicious, particularly when it came to investing money.

In Shakespearean tragedy, we can rely on the lead miscreant being hoist on his own petard. Life is rarely that neat or that fair. But in George’s case, it seemed to come true in practically every way.

Faaascinating. Just faaascinating.

***

[1] Note: technically my “mother” was my stepmother, but since my birth mother had died a few days after I was born, she was the only mother I had ever known, so I'll keep it simple and refer to her as my mother.

[2] My father and my birth mother had come from Germany to escape the Nazis, and both my sister and I had other relatives in Europe and elsewhere, but none that we had ever met.

[3] Homogenized milk, according to this argument, converts larger fat globules into tiny particles that are too small to rise to the top as cream. In turn, these tiny fat particles pass into the bloodstream more easily, where they help clog the arteries. I have no idea whether this is true.

[4]  To get a picture of Nat in your mind, think of a Jewish James Gandolfini from the Sopranos – minus the murders, of course.

[5] He was less successful in making conversation with my sister; he would simply ask her if she had been taking her “pretty pills” and leave it at that.

[6] Urban legend held that M-80s packed a charge equivalent to a quarter-stick of dynamite. This was a considerable exaggeration. M-80s were also manufactured by various companies. Mine were in silver tubes, many other versions were in red, which may have added to the dynamite association.

[7] The townhouse was on West 19th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenue. On the corner of 19th and 8th Avenue was the newly refurbished Joyce Theater, which continues to be a cultural force today. An apartment on that block was recently for sale for $12,500,000.00.

[8] Hell, for all I know he may have been seeing her when Sylvia was thoroughly alive and kicking. This may be partly reinforced in my mind by Jean’s rather too-frequent assertion that George had been lucky and had “had a good marriage.”

[9] The story (first a play, then a movie) is about an acerbic and overbearing critic who, after dinner at the home of a prominent family, slips on the ice and breaks his hip and uses this as an excuse to become their helpless and demanding house guest indefinitely. (Later the doctor examines him and discovers there is nothing wrong with his leg at all, and that he has been faking the whole thing.)

[10] Was this the woman who called after George’s death? Or yet another woman? Who the hell knows?

©2016 - Peter A. Hempel

Approx. 11,000 words