Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  “That’s exactly the position you’re in.”

  “Sometimes if you push these things you make people give you a definite answer when the answer isn’t really definite.”

  They could hear the front door opening, down the hall, somebody running up the stairs, and Susie calling out, “My kids at least need to wash their hands.” Nathan bent down to check on the potatoes—he could feel the blast of heat against his face, then lifted the pan out using a couple of dish towels and set it at an angle across the burners. The smell of garlic and rosemary filled the kitchen, and he took a wooden spatula and scraped at the potatoes to loosen them from the metal.

  “You’re hoping for something that you basically know isn’t going to happen.”

  “I’m hoping,” she said, and turned off the oven, “but I don’t know,” and Liesel came in, with her eyes bright from the exercise. “Sag mal, Kinder, dass sieht Klasse aus …” and then, in English, “Do I have time to get changed?”

  “I have time to get changed,” Nathan told her, “but I don’t know if you do.”

  “Well, I’ll be quick,” she said, and Jean added, “I have to take the other potatoes out anyway.”

  She followed her brother out the backdoor and he said to her, “Look, I’m not trying to give you a hard time.”

  “So don’t give me a hard time.” She left the sliding door open behind her and walked past him into the library to the kitchen at the other end. Then she took the stuffing out and came back. “This’ll take two trips,” she said.

  “You’re letting the cold air in.”

  “Well, then, you can take the other potatoes over. I want to make myself look pretty anyway.”

  “You are pretty,” he said, but it was a stupid thing to say, and he knew it, though it didn’t matter much. They looked at each other for a moment, as she stood in the doorway with the dish in her hands. “I’m Marilyn Monroe,” she said and when she left he pulled the door closed.

  *

  Susie wore her wedding dress, which she could still fit into. It wasn’t anything fancy or white, but just the kind of pretty dress you wear to a party, though more expensive—from Saks Fifth Avenue. She said to David, when they were working out wedding details, I’m going to get the dress from Saks and you’re not going to ask me how much it cost. But her tastes were modest, and what she wanted was something she could continue to wear, so that afterward what she ended up concealing from him was how reasonable the price was … and she thought, the secrets of marriage.

  Jean put on something Henrik had given her, a sheath dress covered in little spangles, squares of metal, the kind of thing she would never have worn before they started going out. She felt self-conscious in it, too tightly wrapped, on display, but it was an act of loyalty to wear it, and everybody made nice noises. Very London, Dana said, when she came down. “What does that mean?” Jean asked her, bristling slightly. “It means classy, it means fun,” Dana said. “I always think, when I go to London, they’re not so serious, they know how to have a good time.” Dana herself wore black jeans and a simple sleeveless black top. She looked unornamented but at the same time almost stupidly lovely, long-limbed, like an athlete of prettiness, her face only faintly made-up, a bit of lipstick, to prove that she had made an effort. Nathan walked in in his suit and tie, dark suit, paisley tie, the expression on his face an expression that went with the suit, conscientious and charming, social but also a little formal, which he couldn’t help. He had a part to play, especially with Bill out of the house, and began carving the goose, standing at the kitchen counter after pinning his tie between two buttons of his shirt.

  Julie was the only kid who dressed up, in one of Bill’s mother’s dresses, conservative Jewish middle-class finery, which now looked quaint and somehow like the kind of thing a kid would wear, putting on old-lady clothes, except that Julie didn’t look like a kid anymore. Underneath she had on black Doc Martens. There was a tenderness Nathan felt for her, because of their clothes and the sense of occasion, so that when she passed him in the kitchen he bent down to kiss her short hair and she leaned against him, feeling a little foolish. It was a step for her, putting on a dress; she did it to please him. Paul wore what he had been wearing all day, sneakers and jeans and a T-shirt, it wasn’t his house anymore and he didn’t have anything to change into.

  “I didn’t realize we were doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Dressing up.”

  “It’s on a volunteer basis,” Jean said.

  David, big-chested, open-necked, had put on a jacket. Liesel wore her complicated silver necklace, which had many layers and strands that fell across her linen smock. Bill gave it to her, after she saw it in a market and decided she didn’t deserve it, because of the price … but a few months later, at her birthday … another one of the secrets of marriage. Clémence had wrapped herself in a shawl of some kind, a vivid Moroccan blue, over a low-necked gown, which showed her dark skin. Her hair, tied back, was white and black, her face, with the forehead exposed, looked eager and pleasant. Everybody sat down. Susie lit candles and turned off the overhead light. The table, crowded with food, and the rose patterns on their grandmother’s Royal Bavarian plates, the pale blue singing birds inside them, Liesel’s old fine-stemmed glasses, filled with red wine (Nathan had decanted a bottle of Malbec earlier in the afternoon), tumblers of Coca-Cola for the kids, to keep them up late … Paul felt subtly excluded from whatever ritual was being performed, partly because of the way he was dressed, but it wasn’t just that, and the feeling only grew stronger as the night wore on. He stopped drinking after one glass of wine, because he still had to make the drive back to Wimberley, and even though Jean didn’t drink much either, even though Susie was still breastfeeding, a sense of constraint had crept into his relations with all of them, and Dana, somehow, seemed to be included in that constraint … he couldn’t quite reach her.

  Julie still wanted to talk about the playhouse—she couldn’t believe somebody used to live in it, it made her feel … it made her feel like … “What I am, I guess. A spoiled little rich kid. A spoiled little rich white kid.”

  “None of this is your fault.”

  “At Granma’s house, when I was little,” she was doing a voice, faintly sing-song, pretending to be older and looking back, “I used to play in the shack where the slave used to live. It was fun.”

  “He wasn’t a slave, he was …”

  “I want to sleep there tonight,” Julie said.

  “Why do you want to sleep there?”

  “I don’t know, I just do. I want to see what it’s like.”

  “I bet it’s fun,” Ben said.

  “Stop it, both of you.” Susie was trying to eat with May on her lap—she kept giving her spoonfuls of mashed potato and sneaking in pieces of goose. May had become suspicious, she was testing the food on her tongue, and Jean said, “She’s on to you,” while Susie went on, “Nobody’s sleeping in the playhouse.”

  But Nathan disliked it when people intervened with his kids. “She can sleep in the playhouse if she wants to. It might be good for her.”

  “It might be cold for her,” Clémence said.

  “I don’t want to do it because it’s good for me.”

  And so on … Clémence tried to change the topic. She had knocked on a few doors on 37th Street, to ask about the lights, but only one woman answered, saying, “Personally I don’t understand how anybody can get to sleep.” It wasn’t her house, she was babysitting for her daughter. “It’s like living on Broadway.” People walked right into the front yard, they left bottles of beer on the bench. “They ring your doorbell,” she said, and looked at Clémence, but added, “I’m sorry, I’m feeling kind of pissy right now. Somebody gave my dog nuts to eat, and he hasn’t been able to (excuse me) shit all day.” She had straight gray hair and a longish face; she was wearing a TCU T-shirt with the slogan, Fear the Frog. “You realize something about people,” she said, “when you have a dog. Other people are idiot
s.”

  “What did you say to her?” Jean asked.

  “What could I say? I ran away.”

  Eventually they agreed that Julie could sleep in the playhouse but not tonight—it was going to get too late anyway and nobody wanted to carry a mattress out there in the dark. “I’ll do it,” she said but had lost steam.

  When the phone rang, Liesel responded instantly, “That’s Bill,” and struggled to push her chair out. She had been waiting for him to call all day. She wanted to hear about Rose, but it also surprised her sometimes, when the kids came home, and brought their kids, and the whole house was taken over, how much she felt the need of Bill as a kind of ally, or not exactly that, but somebody who was in the same boat—putting up with all the noise and disorder, and not just the noise, but the pressure on your attention, and even on your sympathies, which you have to somehow distribute evenly, not just to your own children but the grandkids, too … Otherwise, you get blamed for it. Meanwhile, your own life is basically on hold, which nobody seems to notice. But when she reached the phone, it wasn’t Bill, and for a minute she couldn’t work out who it was, a voice kept saying Hallo, Hallo? in some confusion, almost as if she had called him, and then she realized her brother was on the line.

  “Sag mal,” he said, almost angrily, “ich hör garnichts, ihr seid alle zu laut.” I can’t hear a thing, you’re all too loud, and Liesel turned toward the table and made a gesture with her hand. “Seid ruhig,” she said, channeling her brother, his tone and impatience. Be quiet. And then, in English, for the in-laws: “I can’t hear.”

  Klaus had just gone to Midnight Mass, for Mutti’s sake—to Sankt Johannis, the big gothic church in Altona, where he lived. Once a year he went, and always at Christmas, and always it was full of people. Who knew there were so many people who want to go to church; the organ is new, it makes a wonderful—noise, and since he can’t hear anything anymore … But I can hear that. They played Haydn, the Nikolaimesse, Schnabel’s Transemus, and of course Franz Gruber. All these people … children, too, even a few babies, but when he got home he found he couldn’t sleep. It was one in the morning, and across five thousand miles of phone lines, or really much farther (they bounced the signal into the skies), Liesel could hear the loneliness in his voice, like the echo on marble tiles of a hospital corridor.

  May had started spitting food on the floor and Jean got up to fetch a cloth. Cal still slept. He lay in his stroller in the doorway to the TV room, and Dana, every time she looked over to check, felt something like guilt or anxiety, about what she was doing to him, keeping him up like that, when he was ill, but also … Maybe she should wake him, because he was missing out, and the whole point of coming here was so that … Nathan said to Julie that if she wanted to knock on Dodie’s door tomorrow, he would go with her. Dodie could probably tell her something about Mosby, but Susie broke in, somehow taking her son’s side, that you can’t knock on somebody’s door on Christmas Day. Of course you can, he said, she’s a lonely woman … She has a daughter … Well, there was nobody there today … and Clémence said in an undertone to David, who was sitting next to her, “I don’t think I’ve said congratulations.”

  “You mean because I managed to drag her away from all this?”

  “I mean because of the job.”

  Paul looked at Dana, he wanted to catch her eye, but she was saying to Ben, “The longer you can put off … I mean, that’s something everybody always tells you, isn’t it …” But he didn’t know what they were talking about and felt a strange pang, of jealousy or … Because why should Ben get to sit there like that, next to her, and listen to her … but Willy was trying to get his attention. He said, “Uncle Paul, Uncle Paul,” the repetitions of children, which never change tone, or only slightly. Even when he talked to you he kept interrupting himself to say your name. “I was—like this, and then—Dad—Uncle Paul—and then …” He was trying to say something about tennis, about playing tennis and hitting the ball, but—instead of hitting it on the front of the racket, where he was trying to hit it, he missed but on the—he couldn’t explain himself—after he swung and missed, he accidentally, Uncle Paul … and Paul said, “That’s funny,” but Willy kept going anyway, he hadn’t finished his story. I hit it backward … behind me and Paul said again, “That’s funny,” while Liesel looked on, feeling the crowded table, the noise of her life, and said to her brother, “I’ve been reading Father’s letters …” because at the same time, in her brother’s loneliness, she felt a kind of release or escape, a slightly cooler air communicated down the phone line, as if she sat in a draft in a stuffy room.

  After supper they left the table to be cleared up later and went into the living room, where Paul lit the fire—Willy helped him. He had started to follow his uncle around and once, for example, while watching TV saw a commercial that advertised the brand of tennis racket they had been using in the backyard. It had the same logo, which he pointed out to Paul, extremely excited. Look, he said, the Dunlop—a black D squeezed into the head of an arrow. Just Dunlop, Paul corrected him, not the. It was a golf club commercial, which is maybe why Willy felt surprised, but Paul also heard in his nephew’s excitement something else, that stage of childhood where you want only to please and have no real consciousness yet of failing to please … no real sense that something you say might be embarrassing, that you have to watch out. Though probably he got embarrassed all the time at school, and what Paul was actually hearing, almost unmediated, was the way that Willy, among his friends, might try to appeal to them and join in—as if Paul were one of them, but somehow safer, and … you do what you can to teach them to protect themselves, and the rest of the time, at home … Anyway, he let Willy light the fire. He gave him the matches and told him where to touch the newspaper, and afterward, before the flame reached his nephew’s fingers, blew it out.

  Dana wheeled Cal into the living room like an invalid, or an old man. He just sat there, being present—fast asleep. Then she remembered her camera and went back to the breakfast room to get it. For the rest of the evening, when her hands were free and she wasn’t singing, she took photographs, and later that night, in the dark of their room, while Cal was finally asleep in his bed, she looked them over in the glow of the digital light. Including the pictures she took of Paul, wondering what she felt about him.

  Susie and Jean and Clémence lit the Christmas tree lights (click-flash!), because the Essingers, like good Germans, used real beeswax candles. A bucket of water stood under the tree, with a wet towel draped over the side. It always seemed to Dana a kind of craziness, to light dozens of little fires in the middle of a pine tree in the middle of your living room, but it also made her feel like her own family traditions, such as they were, grew out of shallow soil. When they were finished, Susie turned the lights off. The fire was burning brightly now, and the tree itself cast an immensely complex and strangely moving glow, made up of overlapping shadows and arcs of light, faint halos of unclarity around the candles themselves, slight movements, as the branches shifted under the changing weight of the melting wax.

  Liesel in every room of the house had certain chairs she always sat in, and which were always ceded to her, whenever she walked in. In the living room, she occupied the bentwood rocker and fidgeted it around to face the tree. Ben liked to look at the fire; he sat on a stool in front of it. Susie and the rest of the kids squeezed together on the sofa. Julie wanted to sit next to May, who lay on Susie’s lap, and Willy and Margot piled around them. Jean, in her spangled dress, sat up straight and uncomfortably on the fauteuil armchair, which Bill had bought in a market in Berlin and shipped over. Some of the spangles were a little loose—she didn’t want the kids to jump on her.

  “Should we sing?” Liesel asked, and Susie said, “Let’s start with the Hanukah songs.” For Bill’s sake, in the spirit of raising a glass to absent friends.

  By this point, even the in-laws knew many of the words, though not always what they meant. They sang Mi Y’malel and Maoz Tzur and for the
kids I have a Little Dredel and Hanukkah oh Hanukkah. Dana actually had the best voice among them. She had spent five years in the choir at Sidwell Friends (the uniform was a surprisingly short brown sleeveless dress; the girls felt safety in numbers but also enjoyed the attention) and Paul was reminded listening to her that there always seemed to be something impersonal about her talents, and even her looks. Singing was just another thing she could do well, with expression and range—but you couldn’t tell whether she liked it or not. Even at parties, as soon as they entered a roomful of people, he sensed her … not distraction exactly, but a kind of glaze would cover the surface of her face, so that he felt a little removed from her, or rather, just like any of the other guys at the party, trying to catch her eye. But he liked watching her sing.

  David also joined in loudly … Who can retell the things that befell us, who—can—count—them? … in his slightly comic church-hall baritone. Every year in the village he grew up in the Christmas concert at St. Nicholas was the big-ticket cultural event. His mother, at the age of seventy-nine, still sang for the Brockenhurst Choir, which was practically semiprofessional. They went on tours and their conductor was Royal College-trained and, in civilian life, the Director of Music at King Edward’s. One of the many ways he had disappointed his parents, he liked to say, was dropping out of the school choir. But the truth is, he enjoyed singing, and the Jewish songs moved him. Partly because of … various things, including the fact that both of his parents struck him as garden-variety anti-Semites, the kind of people who believe that Jews talk only about money, and to see his own children humming along to the Maoz Tzur … he put an arm around his wife.

  After Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah, Susie suggested Auf dem Berge da wehet der Wind (shrugging him off very slightly) and the singing shifted without any pause or transition into the Christmas songs of Liesel’s German childhood: Schneh Flöckchen, weiss Röckchen and even the famous Franz Gruber … The wind blows on the mountain … little snowflake in the little white frock … silent night … while the candles flickered and grew still, and Liesel, listening, thought of her brother and his cold apartment, coming home after Midnight Mass. While I am surrounded, and she remembered something her mother once said, shortly before she died, when everyone came to visit her, that you should make as many people as you can, who love you. But then the kids started opening their presents and Liesel had toward the whole business the reaction she usually had but which somehow always managed to surprise her. Such excess, such wastefulness, her mother would have thought. And the way they just take it for granted … It also annoyed her that Dana kept taking pictures.