She shot him a glance: “You really wanna know, or are you just asking to be polite?” Artie scowled. She said, “Meatball sub.”
“Nonsense. There is no such thing.”
Sis took offense, and her driving showed it. “Is too. I can get one up on Division Street.” She threatened to wheel the car around and prove it until he conceded.
The nonsense conversation shut off abruptly so she could concentrate on a particularly iced, obliterated patch of road. For fifty yards they slid out of control, their safety decided by inches either way. In the proprietary, respectful moment after near-tragedy, they launched back into the avoidance game with doubled urgency. They did movies, books, former teachers, states of the Union, flowers, ice cream flavors, and popular songs. Considering how long they had known one another—“You’re almost like a brother to me,” as she was fond of saying—both were surprised at how little they knew about each other.
After exhausting all other topics, Artie knew there was no more point in hiding. “Favorite moment with Dad?”
Rach’s mouth wavered in insurrection. She hesitated, tried to answer, then shook her head. Artie covered for her. “I was just a kid. Twelve, maybe. Dad was teaching; we still lived out East. He took me into school on a Saturday. Remember how he used to do that? Made you feel a little vulnerable, sneaking behind enemy lines. He took me into a classroom and hooked up a tape recorder. He gave me a set of headphones and took one himself. Fun. Like we were pilots, or something. We listened to a tape of a man with an astonishing voice, recorded outdoors, over a PA system. I had never heard such a voice, and at first I couldn’t make out the speech. A dream of mountains being leveled and valleys lifted. All very strange to me. I looked over at Pop, and he was crying like a little child. Free at last. It frightened me. But I’ve thought of it every day since.”
Rach tried to ask him why, if it had been so frightening then, the moment was now his favorite. But she could not get the question out. After an unbearably long silence during which they made only three quarters of a mile, she asked hoarsely, “How’s about poems? Or did we do that one already?”
Artie looked off south where the snow seemed to be lifting. A farm dog wandered lost near the snow fence just over the shoulder. It lifted one leg at a time, spewing powder with each move, pistoning back into the drifts without making progress. Flakes dusted its face, a skinless skull on body. Artie watched the animal pick itself up and plunge back in, scraping its belly against a white tide that left its limbs useless. Favorite poetry: he thought of Pop’s discovery of Eliot, “Quick now, here, now, always,” the war poem. And the Irish Airman, and the Unforgiving Minute: all of them war poems. He thought of his own love for the rhythmic line, sacrificed to a career in practical reading. He thought of the few moments he had spent with Dad, their truce of mutual enjoyment, and he knew there would be no more like them.
“No favorite poem? How about favorite line?” Artie looked over, his lip pinched up. The same idea occurred to them both—old spell of atavism—and they rushed each other to the punchline: “Hey, baby, whatcha doin’ tonight?” They laughed and fell silent. Rach did not pursue.
They pulled into the driveway an hour later than planned. Artie guided Rach in with Lily’s old joke: “It’s the white one, with the pitched roof.” So were they all, on this street, and on the next, and in the next town over. Eddie Jr., out in the yard, an overbundled blob in knit stocking cap, was attempting something with a snow shovel, although by the look of the driveway it could not possibly have been shoveling.
The kid looked up as his elders and wisers pulled in. “Finey desie to show up for Chrisyma?” Mealymouthed, chill-blained, he was past being aware of having been out too long. Artie and Rach exchanged quick looks. Older brother relieved the boy of the shovel while Sis wrapped a warm arm around him, led him up the walk, and shepherded him indoors. Inside, she helped him off with his boots.
Mother made a show of bravely waving them in. She had dressed festively, gussied up with odds and ends from out of the long-unused wardrobe. She looked wonderful except for the incongruous oven mitt she waved at them. The oversized hand made her look like a fiddler crab. Greeting was brief; she immediately retreated to the kitchen, where some item was just due up and needed attending.
Lily, on the front couch, the one that folded out into a sleeper which Rach called the hide-a-backache, waved lazily and said, “Yo yo yo.” Art flopped down beside her and thrust his boots into her lap for removing. She protested, “You’re getting me all yucky.” But she was visibly pleased at being included in the activity.
Rach took Eddie upstairs and ran lukewarm water over his toes. On the way, her stage whisper filled the house. “So what did he say, what did he say?” Eddie summarized the call from Neosho. Rach would have nothing to do with synopsis: “Tell me eggs-actly. Whad-you-say, whad-he-say, whad-you-say, whad-he-say.” She swung her head back and forth, tennis-match–style. Eddie told all the details he could remember, which were by then spotty and largely made up.
Eddie flexed what was left of his whitened toes under the thawing water and said, “Lil thinks he’s on his way to Aptos, but that’s crazy.” A moment later, he added, “Isn’t it?”
In the front room, Lily, extricating her brother from his boots, returned to toying with the diversion she had invented to pass time until his arrival. Now that Art and Rach had gotten in safely, she kept to the time killer that had gotten her this far. Her invention involved the TV remote control, a late, reluctant Hobson concession to gadgetry. Mom bought it after Pop almost fell through the picture tube while passing out on the way to changing channels. Lily found a way of using the device for creative editing, splicing together assorted network Christmas Eve fare into a mélange. The more Lily segued, the more the hybrid creation took on a life all its own. She switched channels, timing each crosscut so perfectly that Artie watched the dial roulette in fascination. She achieved a perfect graphic match between a fighting-fundy-from-spiritus-mundi pulpit-pounder and Reginald Owen in 1938’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge’s knees knocked together at the grave as the ghost of Christmas Future made him push aside the moldy leaves and read the inscription. Then the preacher described how this could happen to you. A few deft, rapid-fire switches back and forth between these two had Artie in stitches.
She made a quick jump to a perfect sound match on Channel 7 where a retired jock called bowl-game play-by-plays from up in the booth: “He ran for that tiny sliver of possibility, but They were waiting for him.” Then she shot back to Owen’s “Spirit, spirit,” and then the fundy, “One says, over and over and over,” and then the sportscaster’s “but it gets you nowhere.” She introduced a fourth party, a man seated in armchair in front of a fake library, saying, “You’ve probably seen me on TV.” The crosscut dialogue tightened. Lily managed to keep all the conversants speaking relevantly to one another, as if more concerned with what the competition on the other networks were saying than with what viewers might think of the private conversation.
The game ground to a halt with the crash of pans hitting the floor in the kitchen. Lil and Art jumped to their feet and raced to the scene of the accident. Mother stood breathing heavily over the catastrophe, an overturned mince pie shattered on the floor. She shot an accusing look at the two of them. “Now you come running, when it’s too late to help matters any.” She sat down in a folding chair and sobbed openly.
Lily fell to the floor and began collecting bits of broken crockery. She took a cookie sheet and scooped up the pie, speaking brightly about how much of it was salvageable. “Mother’s floors are cleaner than most people’s mouths.”
Artie sat down near Mom and let her heave a little. Then he reached out and stroked her upper arm. “I’ll guarantee he’ll call us today.” Mom caught her breath, wiped her face with a hanky, and nodded obediently. She cast about for an apology, but Artie overrode her. “He knows we’re all here. He’ll want to . . .” But Artie could not say what, if anything, the old man would wan
t to do. Her son’s failure to finish again unnerved Ailene. She set off on another series of wet gasps, somewhat softer this time.
The crash and ensuing silence brought the last two children down. Witnesses after the fact, Rach and Eddie pieced events back together from the evidence. Eddie looked at his sister scraping food off the floor. He concluded that the problem that had reduced Ailene to tears had to do with food and said, “Good God, Mom. Give us some soggy sandwiches on a tray and we’ll be fine.”
Rach went over to Artie, stuck her lip out, and said, “Why don’tcha pick on somebody yer own size for a change? Knockin’ pies outta old women’s hands.”
Mom at last cleared her throat enough to laugh. She looked up, swallowed, and said, “Merry Christmas, you guys.”
To undo the disaster, they agreed to reverse the normal sequence of holiday events. They would trim the tree before dinner, an undertaking normally delayed each year for as long as possible by the tormenting and gleefully sadistic fugitive in question. “In my day, when I was a boy, we didn’t get to open our presents until Washington’s Birthday.” Or: “Trim the tree in the middle of December? What do you think this is, some kind of pagan fertility ritual?” From Jersey to Penn to Ohio to Ill, he remained unmoved by his children’s pleas, secure in the knowledge that they got a bigger kick out of the season for all the delay and begging.
But not this year. They would get the better of the ghost, gone so recently from the house. In the man’s absence, they at last found the courage to stand up to him, to cheat him by an hour or two of a long-withheld delight. Lily ran into the cellar to dig up the ornament box. Artie and Eddie hauled in the tree from where it stood propped against the frozen back porch. Rach administered. Mom neither interfered nor approved. They exhumed the forgotten bangles. Everyone put on good cheer as each ornament came out of its paper wrappings. “Oh, God. Remember this one? I made this in Mrs. Shellenberger’s class. Third grade.”
“Wait a minute. Didn’t we have a golden one like this? I was sure this one was golden.”
By the time the angel went up on the top bough, they had achieved a reasonable facsimile of glad tidings and good cheer. They had gotten up a beautiful amalgam of green and artifice, and had done it a few hours early, against the house rules. Each felt a secret, childhood joy in breaking the schedule, as they had always for years felt in following it. And the missing man was none the wiser.
As soon as they mounted the last ornament, Mom was ready with the turkey. She had one that could have fed twenty. Rach made up the linen to resemble flowers. Eddie, the only manually adept one among them, did the carving honors. Lil put music on, a hilarious potboiler record of twelve contemporary celebrities swimming against the tide of traditional Christmas tunes. Each kid added a unique, sweeping tremolo.
When they were all seated, it fell to Artie to handle the dinner blessing. Long out of practice, praying only pro forma, he could not find the words. He found himself wanting to pray for experience, believing for a minute that no better cure existed for a world where so many were unwell. Instead, he settled for phrasing the usual petitions: health, well-being, peace, and more such gatherings. He veered away decorously from prosperity and wound up, discreetly making no mention of the missing party. His self-possession guttered, however, when Mom tacked on an envoi, to herself but audible: “And it goes without saying, protect the husband, too.”
Artie cast a last look at the foodstuffs, then gave the go-ahead for their ruin by lifting an eyebrow. At once, platters and gravy boats swung into disciplined orbits around the oval table, years of childhood training coordinating the clockwise motion. After Mom’s coda, no one alluded to Dad until Rach, scraping her tooth enamel with a spoon, grabbed her mouth, muttered in pain, and said, “I’ve got an idea. Drive-up dentistry.”
Form and content were perfect and uncanny imitations of the old New Dealer—his perennial, crackpot, back-door solutions passed off as sure-fire, overlooked money-makers. The room fell silent, as if visited. Rach looked as surprised as any of them: “Now where did that come from?” Ailene seemed ready to launch into tears or violent reprimand when Rach was saved by the telephone bell. She excused herself with a squeaky falsetto “I’ll get it,” sounding like Margaret Dumont setting up Groucho for a put-down.
“Tell them we’re having our goddamn holiday dinner,” said Eddie Jr., suddenly proprietary about the old traditions. Mom shot him a look that both rewarded his newfound traditionalism and chastised his diction. Artie stacked dishes in orderly piles while Lily retrieved what was salvaged of the pies.
Snapping up the kitchen extension, Rach said, “Yellow. You’re where? Just outside Amar . . . ? Jesus, Dad. Every time I hitch, it takes me days to go ten miles. How do you make such good time?”
As one, the remaining family broke from pleasantries to the upstairs extension. This time Ailene had the better jump; she beat her children to the receiver, picking it up in time to hear Eddie Sr. demanding to know why he had never heard about Rach’s hitchhiking before this. Mom heard her daughter say, “Don’t you think the lecture’s just a tad hypocritical, Popski? I mean, I am an adult, and I always tell my family before I make any extended trips.”
“Who’s lecturing? I’m looking for tips.” And a half-second later, acknowledging the new party, “Hello, love.” After three decades of shared days, he knew his wife’s breathing, even over wires, even at great distance.
Eddie Jr., second in the dash upstairs, fell on the atlas and scanned the A-M-A-R’s. He eliminated the only other contender as too remote and far afield. That left Amarillo, Texas. Taught from birth never to deface a book with anything indelible, he grabbed two colored pins from out of the pin cushion his mother always kept within reach of her bed. He placed one in Neosho and the other in Amarillo. Although the exercise made him feel a little like a vestige of High Command, it did the trick. He now had a good sense of Pop’s route.
Artie reached the top of the stairs and entered the folks’ bedroom just as Mom began pleading. “Ed. Ed, listen to me. Don’t you dare joke, damn it.” Artie drew up short; it was the first time he had ever heard his mother swear, and the sound seemed a violation of physical law. He turned around and headed back down to the kitchen, where he methodically pulled the downstairs phone out of Rachel’s protesting hands. He held her at bay with a straight arm.
Mom was still begging. She was so distressed that she hadn’t any notion of how little good begging could possibly do. Artie was clearheaded enough to realize that the thing had gotten out of hand. The situation was already lost unless he took to power tactics immediately. “Pop,” he commanded, trying to give the word an extra couple of decades. The sound of his adult voice gave him the oddest insight: he was now his father’s contemporary.
“Hey, son. You know where the papers are, don’t you? I mean, the GI and teachers’ life insurance, and all.”
Mother wailed spectrally from the other line. “Don’t talk to me about papers.” Artie held the phone away from his ear.
“Have a look at them, huh? Help out a little. Put that legal training of yours to use. What do they teach you at that school anyway?”
Artie wanted to tell the man that he was still stuck in Contracts, that he hadn’t a clue about Claims, that the only thing law school had taught him was to short sell just before litigation and buy back in just before settlement. He wanted to tell Dad how just that week, his senior adviser had exulted in having bought puts in a pharmaceuticals firm being sued for producing birth defects. He wanted to tell Pop that it was time to study poetry. But it didn’t seem the appropriate moment to talk about education.
“They’re in the attic cubby, right?” Artie sounded proud of the old memory. “Why do you want me to look over the papers, Pop? Where are you? Where are you headed?”
Mom was still vocalizing upstairs. The three-way conversation and the spookiness of what Dad had just asked edged Artie from his strong-arm resolution. Time took on that underwater, alternative quality of car wrec
ks, of disaster. Things happened far too slowly to be real, yet they had that sense of being one step ahead of experience, hypothetical, yet far too awful to be anything but fact. He barely comprehended what was happening.
Pop chuckled. “Where am I headed? You’re kidding, aren’t you? Figure it out. I should have made this trip years ago.” Mom pleaded some more, as if the case were not already decided. Artie stumbled fatally, grew meek, and gave Dad time to say, “Don’t worry. I’ve never felt better in my life. Merry Christmas. I love you all.” Artie felt his own failure rush toward him as the line to the Southwest, to the past, went dead. Cruelly, he gave the receiver to Rachel, still scrapping for it. She spoke a few hellos into the mouthpiece before realizing the man was gone.
Throughout the call Lil remained a study in indifference, the only member of the household whom calamity could not touch. She kept at the dinner dishes, a one-woman portage from table to soapy sink. She raised her ears politely, but said only, “Dad, is it? Say hello from me.” When Artie finally dropped into a kitchen chair, he looked up and saw her gazing out the window, arms plunged into warm dishwater, running a lazy experiment with the lemon-scented dish detergent.
“What do you know?” he accused her.
She swung on her heels, looked on him with a smile. “You resent me for making peace with the matter?” Lily did not wait for an answer. She addressed Rachel: “He’s all right, then? Good for him. There’s nothing a doctor can do for him that a road trip can’t.”
Rach flew at the woman in disgust. Artie stepped between them. Before the three knew they were fighting, Eddie Jr. entered the kitchen triumphantly. He held the open atlas in one hand, their mother in the other. He pressed the book’s binding to the tabletop, spread open to the southern Great Plains. He looked around the group, unable to suppress a desire to imitate the great conjurer. Silently, he challenged each of them to come up with what he’d discovered.
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