BILL

     In my parents’ bedroom on a red-painted chest of drawers by the bed is a photo, in a rather simple frame, of my uncle, my mother’s brother Bill, whom we did not know very well, if at all. We had heard things, leaked to us in a mysterious way as they usually are to kids who aren’t going to understand if they are told straight.

     We did know that he was very close to my mother though. That is most likely why she is the one who took this black and white photo of him standing against a wood-paneled wall, gentle-featured, down-turned face, a head topped with dark curly hair, a hand forever reaching toward the urgent affection of their dog Susy. No doubt this photo was taken with her Rollei, the camera Bill had given her to acknowledge the Beethoven piano recital she gave on the radio the last winter they were at home together in the Upper Peninsula.

     Bill had taught her everything about the camera and photography in general. You can tell by the way the photo turned out --well-composed, softly lit, focused, and artful. But what the camera failed to capture was that he suffered much. He said it was an Army experiment…or many. No one believed and passed them off as “fits of paranoia.” Yes, perhaps. There was no way to tell since he drank Vodka straight and heavily maybe as a remedy against the fits or because…They were an unhappy effect those profound depressions in which he sank for weeks on end sequestered in a dark, curtained room in the middle of St. Louis.

     That aside, what is interesting, however, was his gift for mathematics. Before the fits began he worked as an engineer on the Mercury Project where he showed a kind of brilliance in the elegant equations he used to help fashion one of the first rockets to launch toward heaven. He read a lot, was playful, had a good sense of humor, my mother said, and was keenly attentive to others. A temperament like that was fit for the military? Small wonder his spirit parched like thirsty sand and why he drank to replenish it and died of a sudden, still young, while crossing a St. Louis street in October one mid-afternoon, fresh from a visit with my aunt.

©Vincent Montenegro

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