Psychological horror · 5 min read ·
Say Hello to Uncle Verne
A woman's family has greeted the same cheerful relative at every wedding for four generations, and nobody can describe him an hour after.
- perspective: first
There is a sentence my family says at weddings, always in the same tone — half greeting and half summons, the way you'd call a child in from a garden. *Ada, say hello to Uncle Verne.* It is said by the eldest woman at the table, whichever side that is, and when you hear it you turn.
I want to be exact about what happens when I turn, because I have written this down four times now and the four accounts disagree, and the disagreement is the point. When I turn, there is someone there. He is at the edge of the table, standing or sitting, and I am glad — I remember being glad, and warm, and the gladness feels like a coat put round my shoulders by someone competent. I say hello. Something is said back. Then the toast goes on, or the speeches, and I turn back to my plate, and by the time the cake is cut he is gone — not gone, that is wrong, that is a description. What is gone is my ability to give you anything. His chair is pulled back neatly to the table-line. Nobody saw him leave. The glass he had is cleared away without my noticing. And if you ask me, right then, what he looked like, I will tell you the hall smelled of floor polish and the candles were too near the linen, because those details are the ones that stayed, and the ones that stayed are never the ones you asked about.
Here is what survives each time, and I have come to think of it as the family list: a carnation in his buttonhole, a different colour at every wedding. Shell-pink at my cousin Dora's. Rust at my brother's. Paperwhite, and once a green so dark it was nearly black, and I made the mistake, at the time, of thinking black was strange for a buttonhole and pink was ordinary, which is the last useful thought I have ever had about him. A glass, held, barely drunk from. A turned shoulder, toward someone out of frame. The sleeve of a grey suit. That is the whole list. My cousin has the same list with different items. My aunt's list is shorter. None of our lists has a face on it.
Who he is supposed to be is where my family stops being a family and becomes a set of alibis. At Dora's wedding he was told of as my mother's side. At my brother's, my aunt was certain he was her husband's people, and her husband was certain the reverse. Nobody has his surname. Dora asked for it once, at the head table, out loud, in the trying-to-be-kindly voice people use for questions that should already have been answered — and both sides of the church gave the same answer at the same moment, which was that he was uncle to the other family. Both sides had the uncle. Nobody said a surname, and the toasts resumed as if a lid had been put back on something.
He is in the photographs. That is what I would say to anyone who tells me I've invented him: he is in every wedding photograph my family has taken since the war, near the edge, in the grey suit, holding his glass, turning toward somebody out of frame. I have sat at my kitchen table with the prints and tried to do what my grandmother used to call keeping a likeness. I cover everything but the face. I look, then I look away and write what remains. Six words. Grey, suit, carnation, glass, turned, warm. Not one of them is a face, and when I uncover him again the smile is where I left it, and I cannot say whether it had been moving while I looked.
I should tell about my brother's wedding, because that is the year I found out what happens if you don't turn. I decided, on no reason I can defend now, that I was tired of the summons, and when my aunt leaned over and said it, I kept my face on my plate. I remember the cloth, the breadcrumbs, the water jug sweating a grey ring onto the linen. Then it was the first dance, and the interval between toast and dance — I have checked this against the photographer's log, because my aunt bought the proofs like a woman paying off a mortgage — is eleven minutes missing from me. Not blurred. Missing, the way a page is missing when someone has taken the staple out carefully. The family remembers that stretch perfectly, and what they remember is me: me outside on the step with an old man, both of us laughing, me holding my shoes by the straps, me having the best time anyone had that day. My glass was refilled when I came back in. I do not drink, and it was full and warm, as if somebody had been keeping it company.
So now I keep the rule, mine and not the family's, which is always turn, always say hello, and never ask a surname, and be warm, because I learned that the refusal does not subtract you; it only subtracts your memory of being there. What it adds I have no idea, and I can afford to have no idea, because he is cheerful, and helpful — an aunt's quarrel with my mother was settled at his elbow one Easter and has never started again — and because eleven weddings is too many to reopen.
My niece marries in spring. The invitation sits on the dresser, waiting for a reply, and I have caught myself, twice this week, composing the sentence I will say to her as if welcoming her to a duty: that someone will lean over to her during the speeches, and she will turn, and she should. And here is what I will not say at any head table, and write down instead, so it is somewhere other than my head: that after four generations I no longer know whether we have been greeting him, or being greeted — whether the summons comes from the eldest woman at the table, or through her.