I've got twin male cousins of roughly my vintage that I've always known existed, but beyond that hazy awareness I've known nothing of my reprobate uncle's children. “Uncle Bob,” as he was referred to in hushed references to him during my childhood, was a major scandal from a time when Americans could still be scandalized.
When I was old enough to be filled in on the details of the man's disgrace, I liked what I heard. "At last an interesting relative!"
The version I got went something like this: Uncle Bob was the scion of a prominent Honolulu family whose patriarch, my grandfather, was also prominent in the most boring and least forgiving of all the Christian religions — Scots Presbyterians.
No Christian austerity for Uncle Bob; he dove into the bottle while still in high school and never came up for air, which was absolutely unheard of in pre-war Hawaii, especially among the island's white aristocracy.
My mortified grandfather bailed his wayward son out of one family embarrassment after another, but Uncle B finally outdid even grandad's grudging capacity for Christian redemption when his bourbon-crossed marriage to a fetching young debutante of Oahu's upper crust crashed and burned literally at the altar.
Uncle Bob's wedding was held in the biggest church in town, complete with newspaper photographers and society columnists to record the splendor of the event, but Uncle Bob was late to his union in holy matrimony, and when he finally showed up he was so drunk he had to be held up at the altar by his best man. The groom slurred his way through his I do's, slopped a flammable kiss on his despairing bride's blush-red cheek then, turning his back on her and the packed house, staggered down the aisle past the shocked congregation, and out the door, disappearing into the orchid-scented Honolulu afternoon.
But Uncle Bob's memorable wedding day wasn't over. His forlorn bride returned that night to the marital bower to find her new husband in bed with a fetching Hawaiian lass, him perhaps blurting out the famous joke, “Who are you going to believe, my dear? Me, or your lying eyes?”
Said to be quite witty drunk or sober and, when he was sober, my favorite uncle worked as a Hollywood script doctor on B movies. (I say favorite although I knew him only by his louche rep as the family unmentionable.) No surprise that his marriage never got out of Honolulu, but not before what had to have been a truly miraculous conception that produced twin sons, my phantom pair of first cousins.
Uncle Bob's traumatized wife soon remarried a man named Hutchins, with whom she settled in L.A. with Uncle's Bob's two boys who were raised as Hutchins with, I assume, nary a mention of their real father, and nary so much as the faintest curiosity over all the years on either side of our family's genetic bridge to contact each other.
So, here we are late in 2022, with genealogy research booming, when a granddaughter of one of my long lost twin first cousins discovers she has serious blood in common with people — us Andersons — she's never heard of!
I'm assuming both sides of this disinterred relationship are in for some big surprises.
Uncle Bob? I met him once when he stayed briefly with his brother, my father. That would have been in 1970. Liked him immediately. He was very funny in the way that cynical old rummies can be funny, smoking Pall Mall unfiltered longs right down to the nub of his yellowed smoker's hand. (There used to be a lot of yellow hands, but they've been hounded out of sight.) He seemed to be sober at the time, but when he left a few days later my father found half-pint whiskey bottles “everywhere in the house.” The next and final news of Uncle Bob informed us that he'd been in a fight in downtown Honolulu, and had fallen into enough water to drown himself.
I remember Uncle Bob. I was mystified and horrified all at once.