If my family was a box of crayons, it would be 96 pack with the built-in sharpener—that not everyone puts to good use. We have our primary colors and pastels. Our neons, metallics, and psychedelics. No matter how vast the assortment, a few stray colors just don’t seem to find a place on in the tidy little bleacher section in the box.
One particular great uncle was a hue all his own. His family encounters were rare, and always unannounced. He never married. Had no children. I can’t even find any photographs of him.
But I remember him.
If you Google my great uncle’s name, Faust DiGuilio—though I don’t know why you would—you’d find thousands of references to Italian operas, possessed fiddlers, and, nefarious soul-trading with devils. But you’d find no mention of the vagabond who horrified my grandparents with his vulgarity and lack of personal hygiene and delighted me with the same.
Faust’s biography is sketchy. Like so many on the fringes of family, his daily life was largely unwitnessed. This much we know. Faust DiGuillio was the only brother of my maternal grandmother, Vincenza DiGuilio Graziani. Yes, I know, you want a side of meatballs with that. Even as a boy he had a penchant for drinking and fighting. He lied about his age, entering the service at sixteen just as World War 1 was nearing its end. He craved exotic travel that only the Navy offered to men with no money and no education. Faust suffered a head injury in the war that resulted in a semi-conscious coma that endured—wait for it—seventeen years, during which he dozed in a somnambulant state at a veteran’s hospital, somewhere on the East Coast. Updates, typed on filmy onion-skin paper, arrived once a year at my grandmother’s house in an Italian/Polish suburb of Chicago, letting my grandmother know that her brother still hovered just below sleep, but safely above death.
Sometime in the seventeenth year of his nap, Faust roused; a bristle-chinned, liquor-craving, grouchy Rip Van Winkle. What’s more, once he regained full consciousness and his mobility, he had seventeen years worth of accumulated Disabled Veterans’ Benefits, plus interest, and an itch for the road. He’d gone to sleep a poor sailor boy, but woke up an unlikely man of means, in his thirties, smack dab in the middle of The Great Depression.
Someone at the VA was wise enough not to give Faust his entire bankroll. He hopped freight trains and rode the rails to whatever adventure was in store. When his money ran out, he’d return to refill his pockets with his quarterly wad. Then he’d return to the road.
While other families traveled to national parks or Disneyland, for vacations and holidays, the only concept of “vacation” my siblings and cousins held when we were kids was gathering at my grandparent’s house. One summer stands out in particular. I was ten. My cousins and I were acting out an elaborate soap-opera with our Barbies in my grandparents’ cool basement where onions and garlic hung in fragrant ropes from rafters. I rented my brother’s GI Joe for a nickel, because Ken seemed somehow too girlish to be Barbie’s boyfriend. Even then I recognized that certain male friends made better confidantes than boyfriends. Barbie and Joe’s romance was unfolding when we heard my grandmother’s gasp from the kitchen.
“Oh, Madone,” she cried.
My cousins and I scurried up the stairs. “Oh, Madone” from my grandmother—she would be flaming magenta in the crayon box—could mean anything from a batch of burnt cookies to a dead body in the pantry and we were not going to risk missing that. From the top of the stairs, I spied my grandma swooning, my mother and aunt easing her the eight millimeters downward from her wide bottom to a kitchen chair. The back of her hand rested weakly against her forehead. “Oh, Madone,” she repeated, softer now that the ears of her audience were nearer. “Fausto,” she wheezed. “Fausto.”
The name instantly ignited my grandpa and me, but for completely different reasons. He charged toward the screen door with me a mere half-step behind him. Grandpa loped to the side of the house. I aimed straight toward the apparition who’d appeared beside the tool shed.
Even from a distance, the aroma of general unbathedness greeted me along with the fragrant evidence that Uncle Faust had been riding in livestock cars. And recently. The pockets of his filthy shirt bulged with his standard equipment: two transistor radios, each with a separate ear bud, tuned to two different ballgames simultaneously; dozens of pens—though I never saw him write a single word; and wads of toothpicks—another ironic collection given that he had no teeth. He wore stain-covered work pants, and worn leather shoes with no laces and no socks. Atop his bald-ish head he sported a frayed cabby’s hat. His face was whisker-covered, and shrunken, like one of those dolls people make by letting apples wither and cave in on themselves. His prominent nose was hooked and his chin protruded. Absent of teeth to keep them separated, the tip of the nose and the point of the chin threatened to meet. An Italian version of Popeye.
Grandpa approached with the hose, a bucket, a cake of soap, and a brush. He waited as Faust emptied his pockets of his treasures and removed his hat, and shirt to reveal his pale, wiry frame. I said nothing. Silence and invisibility were all that kept me from being dismissed.
Stripped of his grimy garb, but for the pants, Faust endured a thorough scrubbing, and head inspection, a ritual I’d seen before, and clearly a requirement for entry to the house. Faust shivered like a scrawny cat, shocked to be wet. When the shower ended, Grandpa patted the smaller man’s shoulder and they shook hands. Only then did his beady-eyed gaze fall on me. He shrugged and I smiled back in sympathy to his humiliation. “Hey kiddo,” he said. It was the only name he ever used for any of the children and I didn’t know if he remembered, or had ever known my name.
Later, wearing one of my grandfather’s too-big shirts, Faust was welcomed inside. Grandma served the meal of fresh pasta, and braciole at the uneven mountain range of tables that cut through the dining room and into the living room of the tiny house. I maneuvered to sit near Uncle Faust. He squirreled dinner rolls into the pockets of the pants that had been washed in the interim. I watched with fascination as he ate—a spectacular show of lips, and gums, and tongue—grinding his food into an unsightly mass, like dirty laundry tumbling in a glass-fronted washing machine. Not wanting to get caught staring, I extracted ten olives from the bowl, giving each of my finger soldiers its own black helmet. Spying me from behind his magnificent mastication, Uncle Faust opened his mouth even wider, pointed at me, and gave a great WHOOP that silenced the table and turned my ears hot. I’d amused him and it thrilled me. He later regaled me with whispered stories of distant ports, his favorite Amsterdam, where tulips grew like weeds and the most beautiful women in the world were showcased under the glow of red lights.
After supper, Faust pulled a chair up so close to the TV to watch the Cubs that his knees nearly touched the screen. His ears were wired to the two radios in his pocket. Engrossed by the walnut-sized bulge in my uncle’s cheek, I studied him. Was it one of the dinner rolls I’d seen him snag? It couldn’t be gum. Who could chew gum without teeth?
My answer came when Ernie Banks swung at a wild pitch and hit into a game-ending double play. Faust sprang from his chair. “Fucking Cubs are a bunch of bums!” Then he let fly from his lips a pungent stream of brown liquid that splattered TV the screen. Paralysis struck me. Grandma—recovered from her earlier fainting spell— flew in like a cannonball, shook a fist and handed Faust a cleaning rag before she returned to the kitchen.
“Made her pretty mad, huh Kiddo?” Faust said to me with an exaggerated wink, then gave me a toothless grin. He was more an overgrown infant than a man in his sixties. I couldn’t help but laugh and it was returned by his sneaky cackle, transforming me from “good little girl” into co-conspirator.
As I slept that night, I conjured images of the next day’s adventures. Would Uncle Faust try to steal liquor from the corner store again? Or perhaps I could coax him to take off his shoe. He’d told me he was missing three toes—that they’d gotten chopped off when he was jumping into a boxcar in Texas. I’d never seen a foot with only two toes. The buzz of anticipation kept me awake and took away the sting of my cousins’ early departure.
I bolted from my bed the next morning and flew to the back yard. The rusted metal chair where Faust usually had his morning smoke was vacant. Scanning the yard, I saw no sign of him. When I spotted Grandpa maneuvering between the rows of his fragrant tomato vines and I bolted toward him. “Where’s Uncle Faust?” I asked.
“Ach,” he said waving his free hand like he was waving away a fly. “That dirty guy. He shows up. Then he disappears. Bada-boom.”
“He’s gone?” Tears gathered in my eyes. “Is he going to be okay all by himself?
Grandpa patted my head. “Don’t worry about Faust. That one always finds his way to a hot meal.”
I nearly caved in with disappointment. No frog hunting. No spitting. No two-toed foot. Summer ended with a thud.
Back at home, school gobbled autumn and spat it right into winter. As Christmas approached, my brother and I spent evenings turning the whisper-thin pages of the Sears Catalogue, our eyes wide with wishes that would mostly go ungranted. But we dog-eared pages and hoped beyond reason. On Christmas Eve morning while my mom and I made pizzelle and scruppelucci cookies a knock came at the door. While Ma answered the door, I nibbled little stray bits of the buttery cookie dough until I heard her say, “What could this be?”
I ran to the front door, just as the delivery man left. My mother held an enormous package. She read the label, her brows pleating. Then, she held the package out to me. “It’s for you.”
All the air left my lungs. There, printed in neat script was my name. My whole name, spelled just right. In the upper left corner, the same script read Faust DiGuilio. I didn’t even know Uncle Faust knew my name, much less my Indiana address. We’d never received a phone call, a card, or any other communication from him. And now this.
Each child was allowed to pick one gift to open on Christmas Eve; the rest would wait until morning. Usually, I’d agonize over my selection, but not this year. That box could have anything inside: a shrunken head, a monkey paw, or even a diamond tiara.
My heart thrummed as I tore the brown paper. Inside, rested the most beautiful, life-sized baby doll I’d ever seen. She had velvety soft skin and a white silk gown with pink roses embroidered on its edge. She was not one of those creepy dolls whose eyelids opened and closed with an unnatural click when you changed her position. This baby’s eyes were serenely closed, butterfly lashes resting on pale pink cheeks. This was no toy, but a real and true baby—the most unexpected of gifts.
I don’t remember any other presents. I don’t remember our tree or Christmas dinner or who came home for that particular holiday. All I remember is holding that beautiful baby in my arms feeling like the most special girl in the world.
The following Easter, I—and only I—received a Candy-gram: a huge gold box of assorted chocolates, each resting in its own little gold foil cup. It too was from Uncle Faust. No return address. Of course, I shared my chocolates with my siblings, but the glory of the gift was mine alone.
To a girl who felt like the gray crayon in the box, the real gift was not the chocolates, or even the doll, but being noticed and remembered. But then, perhaps Faust was only returning the gift I’d unknowingly given to him.
On each visit to my grandparents’ house, I looked for Faust to appear beside my grandpa’s tool shed. Each Christmas and Easter, I silently hoped for a package. Neither ever appeared again. Long into my twenties, and living in California, I talked with my grandfather about my mysterious uncle. “I suppose Faust got that way after being in a coma for so long,” I supposed out loud.
“Ach,” Grandpa said, waving away that imaginary fly again. “That dirty guy was crazy before he ever went into that coma.” I had to laugh.
No, Faust was not a color that fit neatly into the box—even the 96 pack. And he leaves no relics of his life behind, no photographs, no grandchildren. My grandparents are gone. My mother, too. My children never knew him. Few of us remain to hold the fading memories of this delightfully colorful vagabond.
But now, I suppose, you hold them, too.