That first year the Nolans lived on the block, when she felt she was still auditioning to be a block habitué, Nora had asked Edward Fenstermacher if they had ever missed a year, but he said no, never; they had thought about canceling the party in 2002 but Alma had concluded that after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the pall it had cast over the city and its people, the party was needed more than ever. That year they had invited all the firefighters from the nearby firehouse, which had lost seven men when the Twin Towers collapsed, and nearly all of them had come. “I’ll be the first to admit it—I wept when I saw them,” Linda Lessman had said. Five years ago there had been a blizzard the night before, snow wafting down like enormous feathers for hours until the cars were nothing more than soft, curved contours up and down the block. The caterers canceled, but Ricky and two of his men showed up to clear the sidewalks, and Edward Fenstermacher sent them out for pizzas, and with all of the cookies and candy Alma had made for the holidays arrayed on the table amid the poinsettias, it had actually been very jolly. When Nora and Charlie had left that party the block was still impassable, quiet and lovely as a church, the tunnel of street trees leaning conspiratorially toward one another with their burden of snow, the plows a distant buzz on the busier thoroughfares, Oliver and Rachel and some of the other kids pulling one another down the center of the street on sleds, and they had all agreed that it was a special occasion, the perfect end to the season.
The Christmas holidays were, like so much else in the city, both wonderful and weird. Most New Yorkers complained incessantly about the traffic and the crowds that clogged Fifth Avenue looking at the holiday windows, and yet almost without knowing it, a Christmas spirit crept into their activities, tree-trimming parties, garlands and wreaths at the doors. The city exerted its customary fiscal hold on its residents and turned Christmas into a bonus round, with envelopes for the postman, the super, the housekeeper, the doorman. Every year Nora gave Ricky a fat envelope with instructions to dispense as he saw fit to his various men. “You’re naïve,” Jack Fisk had said. “He’ll just keep it all himself.” Charity, who was given two extra weeks’ salary every year and her family sent a fruit basket—the closest Nora had ever come to visiting Charity at home was typing her address into the order form—snorted at Jack’s remark. “That man don’t know Ricky,” she had said.
One day Nora stopped in front of Phil, the faux-homeless man, who had a new sign: NO ROOM AT THE INN. MERRY XMAS.
“You are completely shameless,” she said, and he grinned.
“Come on—I’m creative, admit it,” he said.
“Does it help?”
“Hard to tell,” he said, blowing his nose. “Everybody says you take in more between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“The holiday spirit,” Nora said.
“Guilt,” Phil said.
“You know there’s a man at the other end of the block now?” Nora said.
“Yeah, I know. It’s fine.”
“Is he a real homeless person?”
“If you mean does he live in a shelter, then, yeah. If you mean does he spend all the money he makes on booze, that, too. If you mean that you would prefer that I be that kind of guy, I’ll pass. You have to ask yourself why you care about that so much.”
“Authenticity?” Nora said.
Phil snorted. “We’re in New York,” he said. “You want authenticity, move to Des Moines.”
“You think people are more authentic in Iowa?”
“Nah, not really. That’s just one of the things we tell ourselves, right?”
Nora looked up the block. The man at the far corner looked like a pile of old clothes someone had put out for the trash. You could scarcely tell that there was a person inside the heap of sweatpants, flannel shirts, jackets, and hats. “He’s going to freeze to death,” she said. Nora looked up at the sky, which was the color of an old T-shirt, the kind Charity turned into a cloth to oil the furniture. Looking up at the sky was an effort. You had to search for an opening—cranes, water towers, high-rises, cornices…ah, there it was.
“It’s not really that cold yet,” Phil said, “and he’s got a good down jacket. It has a little rip in it but he put some duct tape over it. You people throw out a lot of good stuff.”
“You people?”
“Yep.”
Charity thought the same. Twice a year she muttered about how crowded the basement was getting, barely room for a person to move, hard to iron things right. This was Nora’s cue to stack up clothes that were no longer needed, usually hers, usually because they had been a mistake in the first place. She often wound up wondering why she ever thought she would wear something pink, or pale blue. It was as though, from time to time, she imagined herself a completely different person, not who she really was, in her black and occasional gray. Even her dog was black and gray, with the dolor relieved by the odd patch of white. She had always been the same weight, a little slender, a little hippy, so that her blouses were a size smaller than her pants, and she had worn her hair the same way for three decades, shoulder-length, cut blunt, ponytail or bun. Once, years ago, she had gotten a shorter, layered cut, and when she went to pick Rachel up at school Rachel had burst into tears. She never made that mistake again but she somehow continued to buy clothing from time to time that would have been perfect for someone else living somewhere else, somewhere where people wore pastels.
Charity took these misguided purchases to her church, which apparently was unusually active during Christmas week, and where apparently everyone loved a lively yellow or a horizontal stripe. Charity was agnostic about most holidays, even Thanksgiving, but she always took off the last two weeks of December. Before she left she would bring them two of her traditional fruitcakes, which had been percolating in a closet somewhere in her apartment for the entire year, the process of making them beginning as soon as the preceding Christmas celebration was done. Once a month, a jigger of rum was poured atop and then the cake put back into hibernation, and while Charity insisted that the alcohol “got gone fast,” as she liked to put it, the aroma of the cakes was so strong that once they arrived, the kitchen smelled like a tiki bar for a week. The great Christmas lecture the Nolans had had to give their children, along with the warning that if they revealed to their younger cousins there was no Santa there would be terrible consequences, was that they had to tell Charity how good the fruitcake was, although after the first year, when Charlie and Nora had tasted it and spit it back onto their plates, it had gone directly into the garbage disposal. Not the garbage, since Nora invested Charity with magical powers and believed she would be bound to find the garbage bag with the cake inside.
“What if we brought the fruitcake to the Fenstermachers’?” Charlie had said the first time they were invited to the holiday party across the street, and Nora had said, “Are you insane?” Now every year he said it as a joke.
“And so another year has come and gone,” Alma said, standing at the foot of the mahogany banister in a green velvet dress with a bejeweled holly brooch on one shoulder, opening her arms. Her hair was always freshly done in a style that hadn’t been popular for thirty years and yet looked fine on Alma. Nora’s mother had had an expression: “She looks like she just stepped out of a bandbox.” Nora did not know then and had never learned since what a bandbox was, but she was certain Alma looked like she’d just stepped out of one.
It was funny, how different it was seeing people you saw every day on the sidewalk at a party instead. There were air kisses, some one cheek, some two. People who had grown up in Kansas City greeted one another in New York as though they were Parisian. There was even a man in Charlie’s firm who kissed three times: cheek, other cheek, original cheek. You never knew what you were going to get.
There were big vases full of pine boughs, and garlands on the landing and mantels. The Fenstermachers had a tree in their front window that charmed from the street, i
ts constellation of white star lights glimpsed through the glass, and a phalanx of poinsettias down the center of their very long dining room table.
“We should have a holiday party,” Charlie said every year, and Nora just ignored him. That royal we always meant, I like the idea, which meant, You should take care of it. We should get a new sofa. We should replace the garbage cans. Besides, anyone on the block who attended the Fenstermacher party knew that to hazard their own was an exercise in hubris.
Nora always enjoyed the party, and she thought it was telling that the twins complained now that their school schedules meant they could not attend. Even when they were in high school and sometimes acted as though they would prefer to eat ground glass rather than go anywhere with their parents, they always stopped in at the Fenstermacher holiday party, although they arrived and left on their own.
“You should get her mac-and-cheese recipe, Mom,” Ollie had said once.
“Oh, my goodness, honey, that whole party is catered.”
“Really?” Rachel said. “It doesn’t feel like it is.” Which was perhaps the nicest thing a born-and-raised Manhattan child could say about a meal.
“Ms. Marathon,” said George, sidling up to Nora at the drinks table, which unfortunately was in a corner, which meant Nora was trapped. Forced proximity to George was the only downside to the holiday party.
“Is Betsy here?” Nora asked.
George’s wife, Betsy, was an almost mythic figure on the block. She was a thoracic surgeon, apparently involved in lung transplants for children with cystic fibrosis, the kind of job that made Nora feel thoroughly ashamed of what she herself did for a living. Occasionally when Nora was running very early because of a breakfast meeting, or coming home very late because of an event, she would see Betsy across the street and wave. Seeing her always made Nora wonder three things:
• How hard was it to find a pair of lungs to transplant into a small child?
• Did transplanted lungs grow along with the child, or did you need to someday replace them with a larger, adult-size pair?
• Why would anyone who was a thoracic surgeon be married to someone as annoying and apparently aimless as George?
“Unfortunately, no,” said George, as he always did. “She had a patient who spiked a fever. In her line of work, that can be a life-and-death issue.”
No one was sure what George’s line of work was. Like most people in New York whose profession was murky, he described himself as a consultant. But no one had ever seen him in a suit and tie, and the only thing he seemed to consult about was the business of the block.
In the interest of a uniform appearance, it has been suggested—by whom no one had any idea—that the tree surrounds on the block be provided with the same plantings throughout. A garden wholesaler in Westchester County—probably some friend of George, to the extent that George had actual friends—has agreed to provide flats of impatiens and wax begonias at wholesale prices, which would be picked up by Ricky and installed by him at a reasonable cost.
Nora would never forget that one. She had gone out the same day, bought masses of pink geraniums and planted them thick around the tree just outside their front door.
“Someone didn’t get the memo,” George said the next morning, and instead of feigning ignorance, Nora said curtly, “I hate wax begonias.”
The holiday party was one of the only places Nora could not avoid George. She started to move away, eggnog in hand, trying to ignore the mustache of cinnamon and nutmeg on George’s upper lip, but George body-blocked her. “Did you get a chance to say hello to Jonathan?” he said. “Jonathan,” he called across the Fenstermacher dining room. “Jon! Mrs. Nolan! Come say hello.”
“He hasn’t been home in a while, has he?”
“Busy living the dream,” George said as Jonathan threaded his way toward them, holding a clutch of carrot sticks and celery in his hand.
“I wish Ollie and Rachel were here,” Nora said to him. “They love this party. Ollie swears by the mac and cheese.”
“Animal fat and carbs,” Jonathan muttered. “Fat and carbs.”
“I suppose,” Nora said. “But worth it.”
“No, man,” Jonathan said. He was wearing a T-shirt for a band called Municipal Waste, and flip-flops. His ensemble was disconcerting, not so much, Nora thought, because it was just above freezing and threatening snow, but because Jonathan lived in a place where she assumed it was always freezing and threatening snow at this time of year.
“How’s Colorado?” she asked, to be sure he hadn’t moved someplace tropical.
“He’s living the dream,” George said. “He’s into wellness and physical fitness. Clean eating. Clean living.”
“Eat plants,” Jonathan said. Nora was pretty sure that the twins were right, and that Jonathan spent as much time smoking plants as eating them.
“He was up all night talking to his mother, weren’t you, Mr. Mountains? Yakking it up with your mom.”
“Whatever,” said Jonathan, shuffling toward the buffet table, perhaps to pass judgment on the ham and biscuits, animal fat and carbs. Nora could only imagine what he would think of the chocolate-and-butterscotch Yule log cake. She had taken a picture of it and sent it to the twins. Mommy stop Rachel had texted back.
“He seems good,” Nora said, because even in George’s case the travails of parenthood forced her into kindness.
“Betsy got him back here. He’s always too busy to visit, and he isn’t really a city boy. Mountain man, you know? Hiking, skiing, rappelling, the whole ten yards.” Nora looked at Jonathan, who was scrutinizing a cherry tomato as though it were a crystal ball. Somehow she doubted it.
“I wanted to ask you a question,” George said. “Exactly how much were you paying Ricky?”
“You mean how much am I paying Ricky?” Nora said. “How much will I be paying Ricky when he comes back to work?”
“Whatever you say,” George said. “I get it. I hear you. Your better half told me you were Team Ricky.”
“I’m Team Don’t-Bash-People-with-Golf-Clubs,” Nora retorted, then looked around the room.
“They’re not here,” said George. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” Nora said, although she was—about upsetting Sherry, who, she figured, already had enough to put up with.
“You’re avoiding the question,” George said.
“Don’t we all pay Ricky the same?” Nora said. Actually, she knew that this was not exactly the case. Some people on the block, the Nolans included, paid Ricky in cash because that was what he preferred and there was no downside for them. Charlie said that even if he was asked to serve as deputy mayor for finance—“Really?” Nora had said once when they were bickering over expenses, but backed off when she saw the look on his face—he could say that Nora had handled paying Ricky and that he had assumed it was being done properly. Nora had asked Bebe about whether she needed to start paying Ricky on the books because of the job at the museum. “Are you going to be running for office anytime soon?” Bebe had said, one eyebrow arching above the rim of her bright-red reading glasses like an exotic punctuation mark.
But the Lessmans paid Ricky by check because Linda was a judge, and so did the Fenstermachers, when they used him, because their household expenses were paid out of some odd little family corporation. For those who insisted on what Charity called “that government nonsense,” Ricky levied a small surcharge.
“I think he’s been jacking some of you up,” George continued, shaking his head. “I’m trying to get a sense from everyone on the block of what they’re paying him so I can make sure we really want to take him back and that he hasn’t been abusing his position here.”
“What position? The man does chores for all of us for what seems like a fair wage. It’s not like we’re doing him a favor. Especially under the circumstances.”
“What?” said Nora, and apparently hearing this as a question and not an exclamation, George came out with a figure far in excess of what they paid Charity, leading Nora to think that Charity either was paid far below market rates or was ginning up her salary for public consumption to inflate her standing on the block.
Alma Fenstermacher, flawless as always, appeared at Nora’s elbow and led her away. “Thank you,” Nora breathed. “What a nice person you are, to tolerate him every year.”
Alma smiled. “Oh, I believe every party needs one crashing boor,” she said. “And Betsy is lovely.”
“She has a patient emergency.”
“She always has a patient emergency. I don’t believe I’ve actually spoken to her for almost two years. There was a period there during which I suspected he had killed her and buried her under the back patio.”
“Do they have a patio?” Nora said. George lived on the opposite side of the street from the Nolans, one house removed from the Fenstermachers.
“Some awful artificial flagstone. Unfortunately, I can see the yard from our bedroom.” No one had ever actually been inside George’s house, but it was widely understood to be a complete mess. George would hire contractors and then wind up trying to finish the job himself, badly. It was commonplace for New Yorkers to stiff the people who worked for them, but most of them were canny enough to wait until the job was completed and then offer fifty cents on the dollar. George was apparently dumb enough to argue with workmen before the job was completed, when they could see the stiffing coming. His house was half stripped to its original stone, half still covered in a layer of liverish red paint, because he’d so harangued the refinishers that the boss had just told them to pack up their scaffolding and leave. Jack Fisk had once said George’s name was on more legal papers than the U.S. Attorney’s.
The Fenstermachers’ house, on the other hand, was, predictably, lovely. All the original detail had been restored to quiet glory, and the decor was vaguely Victorian without being slavishly so. New Yorkers who owned old houses tended to go in one of two directions, museum or tabula rasa, in both cases perhaps intimidated by the weight of history. Nora remembered when the insurance adjustor had come to assess the replacement value of the Nolans’ new house soon after they’d closed on it. “You know that’s a joke, right?” he’d said, frowning down at his clipboard. Nora knew. You couldn’t replace this sort of house. People tried: old brick from a magical place somewhere in central Pennsylvania, oak flooring salvaged by the Amish, new cornices designed to look like old, mantels taken from other houses. Somehow you could always tell.
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