Four Uncles and a Wedding

About Four Uncles and a Wedding

Polly Faith Harmony is the ultimate ecumenical love child. Born to former hippies turned millionaire entrepreneurs, she’s one part Jewish, one part Catholic, one part Episcopalian, and one part Unitarian–hence her name. Could have been worse. Her Flower Power parents might have named her Polly Esther.

Aside from her joke of a name, her great-uncles, one from each side of the family, are all members of the clergy, not to mention golfing buddies and best friends. To keep harmony in the Harmony household, Polly has grown up alternately attending all four houses of worship.

When Polly’s feminist mother decides it’s about time Polly settles down and start providing her with grandchildren before her biological clock runs out, she enlists the uncles’ help. Polly and her friend Joni have penned the Top 10 Reasons to Call it Quits After the First Date, but Polly soon finds that thanks to her interfering relatives, the list is growing at an alarming rate. Worse yet, she learns that loving relatives on a mission rarely play fair.

Four Uncles and a Wedding

By Lois Winston, writing as Emma Carlyle

TARA First Impressions Award finalist

Copyright

Four Uncles and a Wedding copyright 2012 by Lois Winston. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locations, or events is coincidental or fictionalized.

Cover design by L. Winston

IN THE BEGINNING:

Emancipation Proclamation

This isn’t working anymore. I spoke to the ceiling, my voice controlled and emotionless.

Significant Other groaned but didn’t turn over. He spoke to the closet. Women don’t always come. You know that. Go to sleep.

Easy for him to say. Some men hold records for the two-minute mile. Significant Other beats them by a full minute and does it lying down. Slam. Bam. He didn’t even bother with the thank-you, ma’am, anymore. I felt more like a sperm repository than a girlfriend. I flung back the quilt and switched on the overhead fixture. The room filled with bright light, too glaring for the late hour.

Hey, come on, Polly! I’ve got a big meeting tomorrow. I need to get some sleep.

Fine. Leaving the light on, I stalked into the kitchen and rummaged through the cabinets until I found a box of heavy-duty trash bags. When I returned to the bedroom, he had turned the light off. I flipped it back on.

What the hell are you doing?

You’re leaving. I yanked open a dresser drawer and dumped the contents into one of the plastic bags. Go sleep at the Waldorf.

Are you crazy? He jumped out of bed and grabbed the half-filled bag from my hand. It’s nearly midnight.

Then you’d better hurry if you want your beauty sleep. I grabbed an armload of pinstripes, blue blazers, and khakis from his half of the closet and stuffed them, hangers and all, into another bag. The plastic split down the seam along one side. I didn’t care. I tossed the bag at him. I want you and your selfish ego out of my apartment. Now.

He stared at me, his eyes wide, his jaw hanging down like a broken hinge. You’re kicking me out in the middle of the night because you didn’t have an orgasm? That’s crazy!

No. I fought to keep my voice from rising along with my growing anger. I didn’t want to sound hysterical. Crazy is molding my life around your needs and completely denying my own. No orgasm sex is merely the tip of the iceberg. This is the first sane thing I’ve done in six months.

He pulled a hanger from the bag, ripping the plastic further. I was going to ask you to marry me. His speech took on that pathetic, passive-aggressive little-boy sound he slipped into when things weren’t going his way.

I don’t want to marry you. I don’t love you. Actually, I suddenly realized I didn’t even like Significant Other, but I didn’t tell him that. I’m not a cruel person.

Of course you do, Polly. You’re just angry right now. Let’s go back to bed, and we’ll talk this over tomorrow after work.

I raised my arm and pointed to the door. Out!

~*~

We never liked him, said my mother and father in unison.

I knew you’d come to your senses, said Uncle Aaron.

Just needed to get it out of your system, said Uncle Francis.

Atta girl! said Uncle Emerson.

About time, said Uncle Cal.

~*~

And that’s when the real trouble began. Don’t get me wrong. I love my parents and my great-uncles, but in their own way they can be as manipulative as Significant Other had been—only far less subtle. The weekend after my self-proclaimed Emancipation Proclamation the six of them embarked on an all-out campaign to cheat time and beat my biological clock. And like any loving relatives on a mission, they fought dirty.

Top 10 Reasons to Call it Quits After the First Date

10. He’s thirty-five and still living with his mother.

9. He shows up for a formal gala at the Met wearing black jeans and a tuxedo print T-shirt.

8. He shows up for a picnic in Central Park wearing a three-piece Brooks Brothers suit, white shirt with French cuffs, and a conservative blue and red striped tie.

7. He kisses with his eyes open and puckers his lips like a fish sucking up plankton.

6. He has a list of his former girlfriends tattooed on his left bicep.

5. He spends the entire date talking about his ex-girlfriend.

4. He spends the entire date psychoanalyzing you.

3. He brings his own silverware to the restaurant and disinfects all surfaces with antibacterial wipes before touching anything.

2. He conveniently forgets to mention he’s married.

And the number one reason to call it quits after the first date—

1. Your parents or one of your great-uncles fixes you up with him (which means he most likely falls into one of the above categories.)

ONE

Tall, Dark, Handsome, and Boring

New York City, 2001

Christmas is a lousy time of year for the recently singled. Actually, it’s pretty much the pits for the perpetually single as well. Everyone else on the planet is busy pouring over glossy mail-order catalogs, surfing the Net, or strolling through holiday displays at Saks and Bergdorf’s in search of that perfect gift for that special someone.

Unless you have no special someone in your life. In which case, all your friends and relatives are on a frantic search to find you a special someone before the one day of the year when no one wants to admit to being a card-carrying member of Losers Anonymous—New Year’s Eve.

There is no escaping New Year’s Eve. It’s the one holiday celebrated by everyone on the planet, and when you live in New York City, practically everyone on the planet manages to squeeze into Times Square every December 31. Everyone except New Yorkers. We have more sense and too many party invitations. What we don’t necessarily have is a date for any of those parties, and to my butinsky family, that’s a dire situation in need of immediate remedy.

You can’t keep moping around about Significant Other, said my mother as we squeezed down a crowded aisle in the men’s department at Macy’s. It was Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the official kickoff to the Christmas shopping season. A consummate bargain hunter, Mom liked to jump into the fray early. Her fellow crazies packed every floor, swarming up one aisle and down the next like killer bees descending on a jam-packed football stadium.

I’m not moping. Her assertion miffed me. I’m not a moper. "I kicked him out, remember?"

But you’re not dating, dear. It’s been over two months now. A girl with your looks should have a queue of men to choose from.

Mom always likes to use words like queue instead of line. Don’t ask me why. Probably just to sound unique. As far as I can tell, no one outside of England says queue other than literary novelists or people with Netflix subscriptions.

Mom bounced across the aisle. She never walks, strolls, saunters, or ambles. And she’s incapable of doing only one thing at a time. Whoever coined the phrase stop and smell the roses never met my mother. Instead of taking time to sniff the petals, she rushes headlong into the garden and mows down the bushes. By the time she gets to the exit, she’s made two dozen centerpieces, a kilo of potpourri, and a vat of perfume.  Her body is always in constant motion, her arms and hands animating every nonstop word.

Take Millie Sewell’s daughter, she continued, Brittany. She quickly scanned a table of ties, lifted one for closer inspection, then tossed it back on the pile before turning to me. You remember Millie, don’t you, dear?

I nodded, biting back the exasperated sigh that filled my lungs. I really didn’t remember Millie, not to mention Brittany, but I had learned long ago that a well-placed nod and a smile of acknowledgement fast-forwarded Mom’s incessant parables about strangers. And I had no doubt her tale was meant as parable. Mom had a message to impart. For all I knew, Millie and Brittany existed only in her imagination. It was the moral of the story that mattered.

Well, you’ll certainly agree Brittany’s no beauty, she continued. Not like you. She’s at least a size twelve to your size two—

I wear a size four, Mom.

Two. Four. There’s hardly a difference. She brushed away my comment with a wave of her hand. Anyway, as I was saying, Brittany’s a frump. Mom had a low opinion of women who didn’t take care of their bodies. She herself still maintained a size six figure. Dad said it was due to centrifugal force. She whirled around with such speed that the calories never got a foothold. Instead, they spun right off her.

Your point?

Brittany married an orthodontist. They have a lovely home in Chatham and two adorable children, a boy and a girl. Millie is always bragging about them and shoving pictures under my nose. She wagged an index finger in my face. And you’re not even dating!

Maybe I don’t want to date.

She tossed me one of her silent when-you-fall-off-the-horse-get-right-back-on lectures. It was hard to believe Mom considered herself a feminist. I suppose back in the day, she wasn’t thinking ahead to when she’d want grandchildren.

Look, I continued. I don’t need a man in my life to feel complete. I’m quite happy right now. Actually, I wasn’t. I was lonely as hell, but I kept that bombshell to myself. I didn’t need my mother taking out personal ads in New York magazine for me or signing me up for Match.com.

Really? She grabbed my wrist and steamrolled us through a knot of shoppers crowded around another table. Reaching across several women, she lifted a lemon-yellow golf sweater from a pile and held it up. Although she pretended to study the knit, I had the uncomfortable feeling she was actually sizing me up and making it clear with a one-word question that I had fallen far short of expectation. How about matching sweaters for the uncles?

You bought them matching golf sweaters for Christmas last year, I reminded her. And the year before. And the year before that.

The uncles, all from different sides of the family, had few things in common other than their similar professions, their weekly foursome, and me, their only niece. Under normal circumstances, the first might have kept them apart. However, golf and I, not necessarily in that order, bound them together like blood brothers. Besides, our family circumstances were far from normal.

She held the sweater up to the overhead lights and scrutinized it some more. But not in yellow.

Yellow makes Uncle Cal look like death warmed over.

You’d think with all that fire and brimstone he spews that he’d have a bit of color, wouldn’t you? She dropped the sweater back onto the pile and made a face. At first, I thought her pout was a silent commentary on Uncle Cal, but then she turned the frown in my direction and shook her head. Her wild mane of chestnut curls, as uncontrollable as her incorrigible personality, bounced around her face. People often mistake Mom for Bernadette Peters—minus the red hair and voice. Mom carried a tune about as well as she kept her opinions to herself.

Unfortunately, that never kept her from either singing or stating what was on her mind. What am I going to do with you, Polly?

Me? I picked up the sweater and refolded it. Mom, I’m thirty-two years old. I have a wonderful career, money in the bank, and own a lovely apartment in Gramercy Park. You don’t have to do anything with me.

"I’m talking about your love life—or lack of it. And my lack of grandchildren." She added that last part under her breath but loud enough for me to hear.

How about seafoam green? I held up another sweater, making it clear that I had no intention of discussing either my love life or lack of offspring with my mother in Macy’s men’s department.

You’re impossible. She ignored my attempt to change the subject and uttered the one sentence I had heard far too many times over the last few years. By the time I was your age, you were a pre-teen.

Ah, my mother, the queen of revisionist history. It wasn’t like I was planned, and we both knew it—no matter how much she tried to pretend otherwise. Only because your birth control failed.

She pursed her lips into a thin, tight line before emoting a theatrical sigh. I suppose one of your uncles let you in on that secret? I can just guess which one.

Actually, she’d told me herself, during one of those obligatory mother-daughter talks during my teen years, but to this day she denies having divulged the secret of my birth to me.

She grabbed the sweater out of my hand and read the label. See if this comes in an extra-large. I noticed Uncle Aaron’s been putting on weight lately.

We continued our shopping expedition, making our way uptown. From Macy’s we headed to Lord & Taylor, then Saks, our strides choreographed to the tune of the jingling change weighing down my mother’s coat pockets. At each bell-ringing Salvation Army post Mom withdrew a handful of silver coins and tossed them into the red kettle. I added a dollar bill. I refuse to walk down Fifth Avenue sounding like a refrain from Jingle Bells.

After a quick lunch, we finished up at Bergdorf’s. Mom didn’t bring up my lack of mate again the rest of the day, but I knew her well enough to know she hadn’t dropped the subject for long. She was merely regrouping after a minor skirmish to prepare for a major assault. The battle began in earnest two days later.

~*~

My family gives new meaning to the word unorthodox. Mom and Dad met in Haight-Ashbury in the late sixties during a tune-in-turn-on-drop-out weekend escapade. Both she and Dad are products of nonconformist parents. On my mother’s side, my grandparents came from the Lower East Side, only my grandmother was a Russian Jew and my grandfather an Italian Catholic. You can imagine the Romeo-Juliet scenario their romance caused back in the late nineteen-forties.

On my father’s side, the situation was no better. His mother was a Boston blue blood who traced her Episcopalian heritage back to the Founding Fathers. So did my grandfather, but he was a Unitarian—in other words, a heretic as far as my grandmother’s family was concerned.

Both sets of grandparents are long gone. Mom and Dad were only children, much to the relief of my great-grandparents, I’m told. My great-uncles are the only remaining family—Uncle Aaron Goldfarb, the rabbi; Uncle Francis Xavier Spinelli, the Catholic priest; Uncle Calvin Trusdale, the Episcopalian priest; and Uncle Ralph Waldo Emerson Harmony, the gay Unitarian minister.

Like I said, I come from a very unorthodox lineage, which explains the name my parents saddled me with—Polly Faith Harmony. I suspect they were stoned when they named me. I once asked, but they refused to answer the question, merely raising their eyebrows at the absurd idea that I thought they once smoked pot. I took that as a yes.

~*~

For as long as I can remember, Sunday has been Gathering Day. While I attended college, the tradition carried on without me. Once I graduated and returned to the area, moving a short train commute away from my parents, I returned to The Gathering. It was expected.

I also resumed The Rotation. The first Sunday of each month finds me at Uncle Emerson’s Unitarian-Universalist Society in Greenwich Village. The following Saturday I attend Uncle Aaron’s synagogue on the Upper West Side. On the third Sunday of the month I show up for—but don’t partake in—mass at Uncle Francis’s church in downtown Newark, and the fourth Sunday means a visit to Uncle Cal’s church in Caldwell, New Jersey. On months with five Sundays, I give myself a day of rest. I was brought up to believe in everything. Consequently, I think I believe in nothing, but I keep this to myself because I like leaving my options open. I also don’t want to hurt my uncles’ feelings.

On my Catholic and Episcopal Sundays, I take the train to church, then drive to my parents’ house in Summit, New Jersey with whichever uncle I’ve visited that day. On other Sundays Uncle Aaron, Uncle Emerson, and I meet up at Penn Station and take the train.

I should have guessed something was up when Uncle Emerson called Saturday evening to say he and Uncle Aaron had some ecumenical business to attend to and would meet me at my parents’ home. Instead, unsuspecting me wound up walking into a minefield.

~*~

I arrived at the station in Summit a little before four in the afternoon. Although daylight was already waning, and the sun had dipped below the tree line, I decided to walk the quarter mile rather than calling my father for a lift. Taking my time, I strolled the sidewalks, enjoying the holiday lights and decorations on first the shops I passed in the center of town, then the houses along the residential streets.

Inhaling, I filled my lungs with the crisp evening air, breathing in a mixture of evergreen boughs and the fireplace smoke that traveled up the chimneys of many of the houses. Manhattan never smells as good as the suburbs—especially in the weeks before Christmas—except for the roasting chestnuts from the street corner vendors, and they always smell far better than they taste.

The sprawling split-level of my childhood sits atop a hill at the end of a cul-de-sac. Mom and Dad purchased the house shortly after my second birthday. Before that, we lived in a small cape cod in Clark, but I don’t remember it. Mom says that’s understandable because both the house and the town were quite forgettable.

After my birth, my parents decided they needed to become responsible adults. Or so the revisionist version goes. According to the uncles, the transformation from hippies to yuppies had more to do with my grandparents reading my parents the riot act. Whatever. The outcome was the same. Mom and Dad put their science and marketing degrees to use and got in on the ground floor of the natural cosmetics and hair care craze. They made a fortune. Theirs was the first company to refuse to test its products on animals. The Harmony line is still the premiere line in its field, sold only in the finest department stores and catalogs.

Several years ago, my parents went public with the company and made a gazillion dollars on the IPO. They now spend a good deal of their time working for charitable causes. Each year they donate large sums of money to each of the uncle’s houses of worship. My parents are good people.

With everything they do, you’d think my family wouldn’t have time to orchestrate my social life. Unfortunately, I’m their favorite charity. I eyed the house with mounting suspicion. From the looks of things, they had planned a charity event for this evening.

Cars, jammed nose-to-tail, packed the long, winding driveway leading up to the house. Additional cars lined the street in front of the house. I recognized Uncle Francis’s ten-year-old black Lincoln with the dented rear bumper and Uncle Cal’s slightly newer Ford Escort with the creased front fender. The uncles had had a little mishap in the parking lot one day after their weekly round of golf several years ago. Both refused to talk about it, but neither has ever gotten his vehicles repaired. Isn’t worth the deductible, they each stated in voices gruffer than normal whenever asked. Then they change the subject.

I trudged up the path. My mother swung the front door open before I reached for the handle. Sweetheart! We were getting worried. She threw her arms around me and at the same time dragged me across the threshold.

Having a party, Mom? I slipped off my coat. Standing in the foyer, I scanned the living room. Something seemed odd. There were few women scattered about the large room. A half dozen at most, all my mother’s age or older. The men, on the other hand, except for the older counterparts of the women, all appeared close to my age. I saw two possibilities. Either my mother had decided to throw a party for The Gay Men’s Choir, or she had deliberately only invited those friends with eligible sons.

Oh, I told you, dear. She grabbed my coat out of my hands. When we had lunch on Friday. A little holiday kickoff, remember? She headed for the coat closet, shooing me into the living room. Go mingle, Polly.

I decided not to challenge her although I knew she hadn’t mentioned a party last Friday or at any other time. This was obviously some devious scheme she had conjured up on her way home after our shopping junket. She gave up too easily that day. Instead of mingling, I headed straight for the bar and poured myself a vodka and grapefruit juice—heavy on the vodka, light on the juice.

Drinking never solved anything.

I spun around. The voice belonged to a nice enough looking man who could have qualified as a poster boy for the proverbial tall-dark-and-handsome category or a male model on the cover of a romance novel. Either way, he was definitely eye candy. Six-two, if an inch. Thick dark brown hair with a wavy lock falling rakishly over his forehead. Large dark eyes hidden behind wire-rimmed glasses. A short, neatly trimmed beard with an early hint of gray peeking out here and there that made him look distinguished rather than old. I figured he was pushing forty if a day.

Is it that bad? he asked.

I might have forgiven my mother except that tall-dark-and-handsome was sounding suspiciously like a shrink. I dated one of those once. Jerome Lerner. He spent the entire evening psychoanalyzing me. Then he had the balls to tell me if we hadn’t been on a date, he would have charged me three hundred dollars for a double session!

I told him his unwanted and unsolicited advice wasn’t worth three dollars, let alone three hundred, and his parents ought to demand a refund on his tuition. Then I slammed the door in his face. He was the son of a friend of my father’s accountant and Number Four on The Top Ten Reasons to Call it Quits After the First Date.

You have no idea, I muttered in reply to Tall, Dark, and Handsome. Then I took a long swig. Who are you?

Sorry. He extended his hand. Jeff Jacoby. You must be Polly.

I plastered a smile on my face and switched my glass from my right to left hand to shake his. And you’ve heard so much about me, right? Which one of my mother’s friends do you belong to?

His brows knit together as if he were trying to figure out the extent of my lunacy. Only mildly crazy or full-blown nut case?

None that I know of.

So my mother picked you up off the streets of Summit and dragged you to this shindig? Okay, I admit I was acting a little over-sarcastic, but I resented being ambushed in my own home. After spending all day Thursday cooking and serving Thanksgiving dinners to hundreds of poor and homeless New Yorkers (another family tradition,) then getting bruised and battered at the Black Friday Shopping Roller Derby, I was looking forward to a quiet evening with my parents and uncles. The last thing I expected was being cast as the sacrificial lamb in Mother Maria Ruth—Mimi to her friends—Harmony’s very own version of The Dating Game.

Actually, your uncle invited me. We’re colleagues.

Ah, a clergy shrink. I doubted any of my uncles was in need of counseling, so I figured they must be working on a case together—maybe some suicidal choir director or Sunday school teacher with a secret addiction. Which one?

Which colleague? His expression told me he had made up his mind. I was definitely a full-blown nut case.

I wondered if tall-dark-and-handsome was always this obtuse or if his denseness was in my honor. Which uncle?

Oh. I could see I had inched back towards mildly crazy. Rabbi Goldfarb. I’m his new cantor.

Cantor! He turned slightly and motioned to Uncle Aaron. It was then that I noticed the minuscule yarmulke perched atop his head. That made me angry. It was bad enough my mother had donned her Yenta the Matchmaker shawl, but now it appeared she had dragged in at least one of my uncles as an accomplice. So he’s in on this, too, I muttered. Jeff the Cantor was apparently the ecumenical business that had kept Uncle Aaron and Uncle Emerson from meeting me at Penn Station.

Pardon?

Trust me. I took another swig. It’s far safer not to know.

Right, he said, and I could see I had crossed back over into the full-blown nut case department.

Right.

A moment of awkward silence, lasting the length of an eight-day week, followed. Poor Jeff Jacoby. I could tell he was trying to find some gracious way to