No, nothing at all
No, I do not regret anything
Not the good, that was done to me
Neither evil, I don't care at all...
That house on Pelkey street off Eight Mile was where handsome Uncle Bob lived above it all. Above, upstairs in his smooth white plaster-walled rectangle—the celestial attic.
Uncle Bob was the youngest of the Girl’s grandparents’ children of Aunt Nancy, her mother Joie, and Uncle Bob. He had turned the attic into an apartment. It had a door at the bottom of the stairs that closed off the house’s short hallway connecting the living room to the small kitchen, and then to the glassed-in “back porch” that Grandpa Jack had built.
Uncle Bob would mostly leave open that attic door to the carpeted steps up to his room. He might close it sometimes when he was reading up there something from his neat rows of books arranged on four smooth-polished board shelves.
The shelves rested on individual chrome triangular supports, modern and thin. They were screwed into the wall at the ends and in the middle of the shelves. It made the books look like they floated on the wall. They were like a sculpture. A colorful, linear minimalist statement.
If he wasn’t reading, Uncle Bob might be listening to his opera records. They were thirty-three and a third rpm, thick, Angel Records. They were all elegantly boxed, all with librettos so you could follow along with the Italian words. And they were all starring Maria Callas at La Scala in Milan. Uncle Bob told the Girl the gossip about that diva, about her rumored, ingested tape worm to lose weight, and about her temper. He painted a fantasy land of European elegance and a woman who was an artist who seemed so brave and strong.
The Girl vowed then, in those times when she felt like such an adult to be like that, brave and strong. But it was more. It was being wanted. She was an equal and a confidant and a friend to her Uncle Bob—yes like that, a friend. He was lively and smart and knew a world beyond this attic that promised better things off this street, this cemented grid on the east side of Detroit’s roar of cars.
She could hear the Motor City Speedway. It was more than just the racetrack there on the northeast side of their Eight Mile and Schoenherr quadrant. It was the soundtrack of engines that never seemed to stop, not anywhere in Detroit.
But the Girl knew that someday she would see Callas at La Scala, that she would see things like Uncle Bob had seen, or had not, and had urged her to go beyond him. He would tell her, interrupting his letter writing there at his desk to look up at her reading or playing with her soldiers, and he would tell her that she must see New York. He reminded her many times. And so, she vowed that, too. She was eight years old.
The Girl made images from Uncle Bob’s words: New York, La Scala. . . and maybe someday she would catch a glimpse of the goddess Callas. Her voice was imprinted on the Girl’s memory, her ears, and heart, and mind. In his collection Uncle Bob had only one or two Renata Tebaldi recordings, and those were from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, not the famed pinnacle of La Scala, not with Tito Gobbi singing with Callas.
When he was listening to those legendary Italians sing in Tosca or Aida or Madama Butterfly, even with the door closed down there at the end of the stairs that led to his room, Uncle Bob could hear changes in the tenor of sounds from his parents’ ground floor.
He could hear them in faux arguments that were all Italians’ normal volume. He heard them through the operas or the Broadway shows he collected, too. He heard them through Gypsy and Ethel Merman, or West Side Story, or Camelot and Julie Andrews and Richard Burton. Almost as if nothing was playing on his boxy RCA Victrola, he could hear the tone of voices from downstairs.
The Girl knew this was true, that he could hear them downstairs, because Uncle Bob let her have access to his white room up there. He let her do what she wanted when he was at work at the Grace Hospital downtown. He drove there in his white Buick convertible. He was the assistant comptroller there. He had gone to night school on the GI Bill from the Korean War and gotten a certificate. Everyone was proud of him.
Alone in Uncle Bob’s pristine upstairs space, a window at each end, there in Grandma Mary and Grandpa Jack’s home, the Girl would sit at his desk. Never on his bed that was always tightly made and looked untouched. Besides, his kind of scary sun lamp was always poised over it.
At his desk, she liked the feel of his writing—that Uncle Bob wrote there. Liked the feel of that clean surface of a clear glass sheet over the desk’s wood top. It made such a clean surface. He would slide notes to himself under the glass at the closest edge to remind him to do things, like “car tune up.”
And there were a few carefully slid-in pictures under the glass, too, at the farther edge. All in black and white. There was smiling and big-boned Aunt Virginia, and another of (grey haired and feisty in her pose) Aunt Gilda. Both of them, his aunts, Grandma Mary’s sisters who she had traveled back to Italy to retrieve while she was still a teenager herself.
And there was a photograph with Uncle Bob and an Army buddy smiling in their 45th Infantry-emblemed uniforms. They had their arms jauntily across each other’s shoulders, standing there in front of the Army tent that was their bedroom in Korea.
The girl made Uncle Bob’s world the place where she lived. She would be with him, reading or playing silently with her metal soldiers cast in various war poses that she kept neatly in the cleaned gallon paint can her grandfather gave her for them. She would watch Uncle Bob write letters in long hand to Army buddies from the war.
Sometimes he would use his portable Olivetti typewriter. She was impressed by that elegant piece of equipment, running her fingers over the Lettera 22 in silver metal on its cover above the keyboard. In time, he would let her use it, even teach her how to replace the ribbon spools. She loved that he bought the combined red and black ink ribbons that let her change the color of the words she typed just by holding a key that raised or lowered the position of the horizontal-colored strips.
But that was later, after she no longer occupied herself with retrieving her toy ranch house with the rubber cowboys and the horses with saddles that had cinches she could tighten like tiny belts. She could put those pliable saddles on and off the stunning pinto horse, or the black one.
It was after that, after she no longer played with the cowboys or the paint can full of soldiers. . . or her pirate ship. That pirate ship was a foot tall and satisfyingly realistic. It had rigging from the plastic deck that looked like real wooden boards, to the top of masts. She thought it wonderful that she could fit the dramatic pirates onto that rigging, climbing up. And, best of all, the ship had a movable “plank.” She could extend it outward from its niche in the ship’s hull for those unfortunate pirates she had condemned in her head in some story to “walk,” pushed along by her careful fingers.
Those toys always had to be retrieved from behind the crawl-space doors Uncle Bob had built into the sides of his pristine room. They maintained access to the remnants of the old, raw attic. Those spaces on each side of his groomed apartment were dark and stuffy with sloping naked beams and insulation stuck between them. It was a different world from the smooth rectangle he created for himself, so sleek that it didn’t look like it had ever been an attic. The real attic, though, still hid just behind those delicately-hinged doors on each side of his space there at the top of the stairs. Sometimes the Girl sat in its silence.
Uncle Bob’s room was the place where she lived. At his desk in that fresh world the Girl would take books from those floating shelves. She read everything from his collection of the Book of the Month Club offers and more. From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Morton Thompson’s Not as a Stranger, any of those perfectly aligned spines with impressively lettered titles. She ran her hands over them, carefully picking them up, finally choosing.
Uncle Bob’s room gave the Girl a nest. And it forced her to be an explorer.