Flash Non-Fiction: The Box in the Basement - The Forgotten Stories of Great Uncle Harry by Maria Newsom

By Maria Newsom

As executor of my late great Uncle Harry’s estate, my mother inherited a box of short stories. Miraculously, this collection of hand-typed, double-spaced sheets of medium-weight paper survived four cellar floods in my parents’ Brooklyn home. Each time the waters abated, mom was relieved to find the box dry. Still, it never came upstairs. Eventually, my parents moved upstate, and the box moved to a new basement. It still hadn’t come above ground when I visited them last summer and found it downstairs, wedged between rolls of Santa Claus paper and a dust-shrouded set of Encyclopedia Britannica.

I don’t much recall Uncle Harry’s stories coming up in conversation at family gatherings. If they did, they were dismissed. They were “Harry’s hobby,” or “Harry’s little stories,” at best. Mom once quipped: “It was pretty much the same story, over and over again.”  Grand Uncle Aurelio—my own blood, and a fellow writer—written off by one comment from his favorite niece.  I imagined how it was—Harry read his drafts aloud in a writers’ group that met in the basement of the Presbyterian church of Hackensack, then ran home to revise, invigorated by the encouragement of his peers. I saw him hunched over the typewriter at dawn, a cigarette bobbing under long, flared nostrils. I pictured Harry dabbing typos with toxic white fluid, wheeling pages out of the carriage, gathering sheets together, and finishing them with a staple.  I even envisioned him sliding those manuscripts into clasp envelopes and sending them off. To where? My imagination defaulted to the stereotype—to Fifth Avenue publishing houses and cigar-chomping editors behind big desks, snowed under by submissions, sending up smoke flares from beneath an avalanche of words.

This is how I saw my uncle: a disciplined writer who submitted often, grounded out most times, but also, occasionally, knocked one out of the ballpark and into a publication. But could mom be right instead? Was Uncle Harry just a one-note storyteller? The cardboard box showed water damage, but inside, wrapped in a contractor’s bag, was an intact stack of stories—dozens of them, separated by paper clips.  How bad can they be? I thought, taking the one on top. The cover page was promising in its professional formatting: name, address and phone in the upper left corner, word count in the upper right— title, lower down, and centered:
​
                                    “Way Out in Left Field”

I opened to a random page: 

“Lacey gasped at the sudden constriction and found herself largely immobilized. She tried to knee him, wickedly, but he had anticipated this and guarded against it. She began to struggle, wildly, but Albert was very strong and stubborn and used to wrestling 400 pound bathtubs so he wouldn’t let her go so she could hit him again. And finally, she looked up, uneasy, into his face and panted, ‘Let me go, you miserable son of a bitch!’ And then it was, he kissed her. He opened his mouth over her panting one, drew her breath into him, and made a prisoner of her mouth in his…

Wow. I set “Left Field” aside and picked up “Samurai.” 

“She bowed her head slightly and said, in a low voice, ‘Have you been happy, my lord? ‘I prayed that you would be.’ Her voice was low and musical. He closed his eyes and listened and the tones were the same as they had been, many, many years before. ‘I am happy now, little shikibu,’ he said ‘as I have not been, for, lo, these long, long years.” And he remembered then, that long ago springtime and the fullness and softness of her breasts, the warm goblet of her navel set in the ivory roundness of her belly, and the inexhaustible sweetness of her mouth and lips. He felt moisture gather in his eyes and he took the frail figure before him and pressed her against his chest. He said, again, ‘I am happy now, Shikibu.’” 

Clearly my uncle lifted the plotline from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.  I put down Samurai and picked up Magic.

“...And from then on, each time I caught a glimpse of her, whether I saw the trim set of her shoulders, or the way her lashes swept her cheek, or how the globes of her buttocks drooped in their insolent, maddening opulence, I was only more lost and more beyond recall, each further glimpse only reinforcing the effect of the last. As if when I was created, all my circuits, switches and relays were programmed, inflexibly, to respond to this woman alone, out of all the women in the world, like magic, the blackest magic, each time my eyes fell on her.” 

My eyes burned in the cellar air. Where to begin? I’d spent eight semesters elbow to elbow with colleagues in the creative writing program at City College. I’d gotten a sense of what made a story work. I’d learned to dish it out to my peers, in a nice way, and to accept criticism in return. I went at manuscripts like over-ripe pears, honing in on bad spots, picking at mushy thinking, and carving out wordiness. Anything phony, or excessive—I pared away to help reveal the firm flesh of what was really being said.  But sneezing uncontrollably now, I was at a loss. This was erotica. Bad erotica, in my opinion. And let’s face it: offensive. “His maleness made him bold.” Yuck.  In fairness, I didn’t have much basis for comparison; the only book of erotica I’d read was Anais Nin’s Little Flowers. This felt seedy in comparison. How could I honor my ancestor with anything that resembled a tribute? I could not. Better to just return the stories to the box and  put a lid on it—for good.

But as I started to slip the manuscripts back into their three-ply plastic shroud, I thought: Here is an author whose writing will remain unknown, even to his descendents. I thought about the person attached to these stories—my maternal grandmother’s brother, a toolmaker who listened to Verdi, played chess, and wrote salacious stories in his free time. 

…

Born in 1912, the boy Harry would burn through books by flashlight, reading under the covers until 3:00am. Then, in 1913, the stock market crashed. He was seventeen. Both my Grandfather and Harry went to work in a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, FDR’s answer to the question of what to do with America’s unemployed youth during the Great Depression. Each camp had its own newsletter; Harry was editor-in-chief for his. Eventually, the teens returned home to East Harlem from the CCC camps and learned a trade. Harry became a machinist. It was the end of his editorial career.

Harry Aita was hard-headed--testa dura--the hallmark of the Calabrese (or at least that’s the rumored reputation.) One Christmas he flat-out refused to concede any downside to the colorization of the black and white holiday classic  It’s A Wonderful Life.  All the Aitas have been stubborn, right down to me. And short. Though only  5’6”, when Harry walked through the door, people stood up and took notice. He “brightened a room,” is how mom described her favorite uncle. “That’s how I would put it,” she told me, “if I were writing this.”   

I came up from the basement. The box was still downstairs, but the lid was off, and I hadn’t yet wedged it back into obscurity. My grandfather used to joke that his brother-in-law was “smart as four colleges,” but my uncle didn’t even get his high school diploma. I thought of the day Harry took his first step onto campus at seventy-three, to visit me. I watched his eyes tear up behind thick lenses which, from my kid's perspective, made him look like a brilliant bottle fly.  He gawked at the gothic bell tower like a Roman tourist facing the Empire State Building for the first time.

...
After dinner, I went back down to the basement and carried the box up to bed. I saw what mom meant when she said it was pretty much the same story over and over. How Do I Love Thee?, Magic, A State of War, all swollen love stories. The setting would shift—from a rooming house to a rickshaw, from the beach to the forest floor, but the plots  centered around only two types of heroines: the lonelyheart—a middle-aged marm waiting for some handsome sailor to say: “I beg your pardon mam, but are you in any trouble?”—or the harlot, who ate hearts like potato chips. In the first scenario, the frigid protagonist blossoms under a stranger’s kiss. In the second storyline, some sap succumbs to a wanton woman, or in one instance, to a lantern-bearing vampire who haunts a New England shoreline at night.  Harry’s heroines made me wonder about his true feelings towards Aunt Aurelia, his wife of more than three decades. I pictured their courtship, him dropping to the hem of her apron to propose as she stirred a pot of red sauce.  I could imagine him feeling heroic saving his homely, thirty-eight-year-old cousin from near certain spinsterhood.
 
Yellowing pages, freed from their clips, lay fanned across my bedspread. I inhaled deeply, hoping oxygen might help me see the larger picture. All of Harry’s stories did have one thing in common, I reflected, none made any reference to a recognizable world. Wallflowers or maneaters, all females were caricatures in collision with equally cartoonish males. There were no secondary characters, no platonic friendships, no political undercurrents, and no true geographical coordinates to pinpoint the reader in time and space. There were only, ever, two strained humans in love—and usually trying hard not to be. I imagined cave diving to be like this: claustrophobic beyond belief. 

It was disappointing. How cool would it have been to have opened that box and found real talent in the family? a Cheever, a Baldwin, an Italo Calvino in coke bottle glasses and Tartan leisure pants? Very cool. Instead, the box would go back to the basement and my family would remain unremarkable; I settled into that reality.  But then a flood of unsympathetic, anxious feelings washed over me, a wave of superiority and doubt:  my writing was better than this mediocre adult lit blanketing my bed—wasn't it? Harry considered himself a good writer.  How could he have been so delusional? I wondered.

These unexpected feelings were not welcome. This was my kin, who greeted me with a warm hug and a cold cream soda from the back of his fridge. One hot day I even begged my uncle to build a rock dam across the brook in his backyard so I could have a wading pool. He did, and the next morning he suffered a mild heart attack, a fact mom likes to mention whenever Harry comes up in conversation. Here was a man who had thrown himself into cardiac arrest so his great niece could cool her ankles. Stones of guilt sank into place beneath my solar plexus, damming me up for my uncharitable reaction to the contents of one cardboard box. 

But this reaction wasn’t really about Harry. This was about me, about how opening that box now brought everything into question. Foregoing sleep, I dove even deeper, hoping to change my perspective, hoping to find something to admire in my uncle’s writing, and in so doing, hoping to reassure myself that my own pursuits were worthwhile. But unfortunately,  I just came up with example after example of how not to write. 

“All right Miss Phillips,” he tried to control his labored breathing, ‘starting now, you will no longer put any flowers on my desk, ever. Is that perfectly clear?’ She was erect in her seat, looking at him, her face composed and unruffled but for the merest whisper of tightening around her mouth. He kept his stare on her face hard and inimical. Something of dauntlessness came into her eyes and she took a deep breath and stiffened further erect and the inexorable, female, swell and thrust of her not inconsiderable breasts stretched the fabric of her knit pullover excruciatingly. He all but yelled, wrenched off stride this time, ‘Is that perfectly clear Miss Phillips?’” 

That sort of flowery hyperbole works for Poe, I thought, not for Harry—nor for me, for that matter. But again, why did this bother me? Unless, wait—was my writing pretentious too?

Weird syntax, wooden dialogue, excessive adverbs, it was all rot. Inedible fruit. Paring knife in hand, I sliced to the stone of each story, but found no flesh to salvage. No chance to vindicate Great Uncle Harry. Not even one firm section of a story to read aloud over pumpkin pie at the next Thanksgiving table. I pushed the pages to the end of the bed and fell asleep.
…

Something shifted in the night and I woke up with a softer outlook.  Even if his stories were shipwrecks, it dawned on me, Harry loved writing them. And that came through—his own pleasure, in his own writing. I put down my knife. There was no point in critique—Harry wouldn’t be doing any more revisions. I read with fresh eyes, eager to get at the heart of what really mattered to my uncle, to feel for that slippery stone of meaning with my bare fingers, and in so doing, maybe I would discover what my own work meant to me.  

Harry was thirty-five when he married his first cousin Aurelia, three years his senior. It wasn’t the most inspired merger, but by all accounts, Harry built a good life with big-boned Aurelia. “She wasn’t a high beauty,” mom said, “but she was a good woman who made a meat sauce with hot sausages and tasty pieces of pork.” I winced at this quasi-incestuous union. “People did this back then Maria,” mom explained. I was skeptical. To her, it wasn’t disturbing to marry your first cousin especially since offspring were off the table—Aurelia had had a total hysterectomy in her twenties.  “They weren’t sexually compatible,” mom whispered, “but you can’t put that in Maria.” Why not? I thought. A young woman has her entire sex apparatus removed at a time when post-surgical hormone replacement therapy wasn’t yet a thing. That’s a big deal. That may have explained the mismatched libidos. Given the unbridled ardor that galloped through the stories I had just read, it was hard for me to grasp how a successful marriage had been forged between placid Aunt Aurelia and hot-blooded Harry.  Unless… maybe Harry spent more nights with his purring IBM Selectric than his wife? Was this just another case of an artist rerouting sexual energy into creative expression? Wait a minute, didn’t this feel familiar?  Didn’t I often choose to stay home to revise, instead of stepping out with friends? Did writing mask my own avoidant tendencies? My discomfort grew.
…

When I left my parents’ home, I decided not to return the box to the basement, not to slide it along the metal shelving, backwards into oblivion. Instead I toted it back to my apartment in Flatbush. The stories now squatted under my bed like trolls, haunting my nights, and shadowing my waking hours. Harry and I were connected by blood and vocation. No one in my family better understood the joy of a well-turned phrase than Harry, or conversely, what it felt like to find yourself still at it, at 3:00AM, reworking that son-of-a-bitch section just one more time. 

No, I couldn’t abandon these stories, or by extension, my Uncle Harry, or by further extension, I couldn’t abandon myself. But I also couldn’t pretend they were good stories, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that Harry was delusional in thinking that they were good. But was that really so bad?  I thought? And maybe Harry did know his limitations, but he wrote anyway. Maybe he just needed to work some things out through his contrived plots of human ambivalence and sexual conquest. This seemed plausible too. There was always an earnest voice behind the narrative, a struggle; Harry had something to prove. Over and over, this voice seemed determined to answer that unanswerable question, “What is romantic love?” 

Love was both a curse and a cure-all to Harry. The energy in  Harry’s writing reminded me of Johnny Depp’s glowing portrayal of 1950’s B-movie filmmaker Ed Wood in Tim Burton’s film of the same name. Uncle Harry, I realized, was the Ed Wood of erotica. There was a boldness to both artists’ style, an over-the-top ebullience that unintentionally entertained. You admired their audacity; you also laughed at it. I pictured a passionate Harry at his desk, an espresso pot at his elbow, Turandot on the turntable, an ashtray overflowing, and a wastepaper basket brimming with balled up words, like snowballs a child had piled high, in anticipation of a big fight. I saw him feeding sheet after sheet into his IBM Selectric, the carriage humming, whiteness rolling into black, the sound of keys striking a ribbon, and the sight of words rising up, row after row, page after page. I treasured this romantic, if not wholly accurate,  portrait of my uncle. There was plain JOY in this vision of writing. 

…

But what about me? The answer hit me softly. It traveled like one of the tidy bundles of garbage that I drop down the chute at the end of my hall; like a knotted ball that falls six floors and lands in the compactor room with a faint thud. Then I had another thought: another bundle followed the first and landed with a soft thud: I needed this romantic portrait of a writer for myself too. In the end, I could only speculate about Harry’s motives, but I was getting closer to understanding what writing meant to me. 

For starters— and this one’s hard to admit—writing meant added value to my personhood; writing meant status. I liked to call myself a writer, I realized, because day-to-day living without this job title seemed a little shabby. Here I was, a late middle-aged single mother working as a teacher’s aide in a New York City public high school. I needed something to dress it up a bit. Writing was the velvet ribbon which ran through my ordinary life. Sure, it nourished my artistic appetite, yes, and I enjoyed the fellowship of other writers from time to time, but writing fed my ego too. That was the smelly truth. Perhaps I was just as delusional as I condemned my great uncle to be.

I didn’t get around to calling myself a writer until the half century mark. It began with a writing contest I’d won sponsored by the public library, for which I was pinned with an orchid and handed a savings bond.  I had a few followers to my blog, mostly PTA moms and friends of my mother, some stories in the local paper, and a memoir piece in a legit literary journal. Small potatoes maybe, but I cherished each publication and felt encouraged up to this point.  But then, with the storm surge of grim developments flooding the world in spring, 2020, I started to question my own relevance as a writer. It was starting to feel more important to devote what disposable time I did have, to making stews from scratch for my teenage sons.

I wondered if Harry ever fed his ego by introducing himself as a writer to the cashier selling him a can of espresso? Certainly no one in the family called him one. So now I started thinking, Am I a writer, or is writing just my hobby too? Who gets to decide this anyway? I wanted to think it was Harry, and me, and any of you who plunk away at the keyboard, or jot notes on a napkin. But I was no longer sure. Harry was dedicated, prolific, and open to input from other writers. Was that enough? Or was it the reading public and the book critics who got to decide? Was a writer a writer if she had no readers?  Did that falling tree in the forest make a noise if everyone had their noise-canceling air buds in their eardrums? These were the questions that swirled the dank air when I lifted that lid off Pandora’s box. 

Well, Harry was dead, and few people had ever read his work. Until now. Now, thirty-five years later, Uncle Harry had the attention of a great niece he’d last seen crossing campus in Frye boots and feather earrings. Timber! The tree had landed, and I had heard it.“Maybe Harry was a writer, after all.” I said it outloud. “And maybe I am too.” 

…

Addendum

As it turned out, Harry was published—once.  At the bottom of the box, under all the hand-typed stories, was a magazine dated January, 1980. The cover featured three-quarters of a chesty nude, starting at her crotch, and cutting off at her nose.  I scanned the table of contents: The Price of Love by Harry Aita, with the tagline: “It’s real heavy to be crazy about a beautiful but cruel bitch.” Here was my uncle’s one published story, printed on inferior stock, in a stag magazine of the lowest order. No matter.  Harry must have felt  proud to see himself in print. I got that.  

“She could feel his eyes drinking her in, as they always did when he was near her. ‘Don’t stare,’ she said flatly, ‘don’t you know what I look like yet?’ ‘I can’t help my eyes,’ he whispered, ‘if they love you.’”

Later I asked mom about the spank magazine at the bottom of the box.  “I never told you the story?” she said.  “No, I don’t think so.” “Well, there was great excitement in the land,” Mom started, as if I was five, and she was telling me the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. “Aurelia was so excited, everybody was so excited, because Harry was published in a magazine called BUF. Now nobody could figure out what this meant. It was called B-U-F, not B-U-F-F.  But still, we thought that maybe it was a nudist magazine or something. It turns out BUF stood for Big Up Front. It was a magazine featuring women who were… um..” mom was fishing for a euphemism but didn’t find one: “women who were, let’s say, overly endowed, to the point of deformity.” I objected. “That’s a matter of personal taste, Mom.”  “Can I tell the story Maria?” “Go ahead mom.”  “As soon as Aurelia learned this new slang word BUF, she stopped talking about Harry getting published and she never talked about his writing again. And nobody else did either.” My heart sank. Poor Uncle Harry.

…

Well today I’m talking about Harry’s writing and his box that lives under my bed— a plain cardboard file box that will never to return to any basement anywhere, so long as I’m alive. I pull it out every couple of months and run a damp cloth over the lid. Some of my writing lives there too, under my bed, beside my uncle’s.  

This fall, I plan to get through the entire Harry Aita oeuvre, one paper-clipped tale at a time, all originals, and none backed up on harddrive. I am savoring each story, from start to finish, until I reach those two short words that hover in the white space at the end of every story, those two sweetest, most satisfying words for any writer: 
                                                                                                         “The End”