by Laura McNeal
“You know I can’t sing,” Ellie said.
He said that she had a perfectly nice voice, but she had no intention of trying the songs Aldine performed, with their vibrating consonants and flutey vowels. It was chilling how easily Ansel adopted the girl’s tongue, pronouncing the words just as she sang them when he joined her on the chorus.
“It’s like I’m not even in the room, Ansel,” she said, and at once he wrapped his arms around her and told her that it was only because she was tired that she was thinking such things, a theory that only made her feel more prickly still, and she’d lain there stiff and awake until she could roll away from him and face the wall.
Ellie put the letter away. For Thanksgiving, she would tell Clare to go out for something, squirrel or rabbit. And if he didn’t shoot something, he’d have to kill Goosey, one of their last layers. But that wasn’t all. There was something else to be done for Christmas, and she would do it.
27
Upon awakening Christmas morning, Aldine took in the sharp chill of her room and cast her eye on the austere gray sky beyond her window. She lay warm in her bed and thought that if ever in time eternal there would be a more cheerless Christmas morning than this one, she hoped not to see it. She used the chamber pot, then cracked her door to listen a bit—she heard movement downstairs, the clank of pans, but no voices—but it was too cold for anything, so she grabbed her book from her satchel and returned to the snug nest of her bed. There were two books in the satchel: Cyr’s Dramatic First Reader, which she’d brought home to help Neva memorize her parts for the Winter Entertainment, and—the one she had now in hand—the school’s red cloth Riverside Shakespeare, which she’d smuggled home for her own diversion.
Aldine had made a bookmark, cut from white paperboard and idly decorated with a teeming and ever-densening thicket of penciled flowers, some with a letter written on each petal to form words (Seizeth, for example, and Breatheth). She always marked her place indirectly—cunningly, even—in Act IV of King Henry VIII, the last play in the volume and within easy proximity of Venus and Adonis. Aldine liked this deception; it seemed to enrich the pleasure of the venture. But, this morning, no sooner had she found the portion of the poem she most liked (Even so she kissed his brow, his cheek, his chin, / And where she ends she doth anew begin) than she heard the scamper of footsteps on the stairs.
“Miss McKenna! Miss McKenna!” Neva called, and Aldine barely had time to shove the book beneath the quilts before the girl flung open the door and burst into her room. “Sausage!” Neva exclaimed. Really the girl was almost screaming. And (it must have floated in with the girl) Aldine caught the most marvelous scent of cooking meat. “Marmalade, too!” Neva sang out. “And strawberry jelly and oranges and, oh, just . . . everything!” She’d taken Aldine’s hand and had begun to tug. “Mama says it was Santa but I don’t think it was, do you?”
Aldine, pivoting, swung her legs to the edge of the bed, but her movement beneath the twisted covers pushed the hiding Shakespeare suddenly forward: the volume fell to the floor with a violent ka-thump.
For a moment they both stared at the immense volume lying there splayed open; then Neva said, “Oh, you! You fell asleep reading, didn’t you?” She bent to the floor and folded the book neatly closed. “I do that all the time!”
“I do as well,” Aldine said in the calmest manner she could manage, but the demeaning aspect of fooling a guileless eight-year-old did not escape her. She rose and set the book back into her satchel.
“What about this?” Neva said.
She’d picked up the bookmarker decorated with teeming flowers and petals spelling Breatheth and Seizeth.
“Oh, it’s a bookmark I’ve had for years now,” Aldine said, a bare-faced lie, and she slid the marker into The Merchant of Venice at the front of the volume, eight hundred pages and several climate sectors from Venus and Adonis.
Neva was holding out the chenille robe that Aldine had worn the night before for a bit of extra warmth while she read in her room.
“Hurry!” Neva said. “Wear this.”
Aldine gave a laugh. “I’ll freeze, Neva.”
“You won’t, though! It’s ever so much warmer downstairs. Clare has the fire raging.”
So Aldine slipped into the robe, cinched the ropy belt tight at her waist, and followed Neva downstairs, where Mr. Price sat binding a package with twine. Aldine pulled the lapels of her robe together at the collar, but Mr. Price seemed pleasantly surprised by her informal entrance, and when in his low, gravelly voice he said, “Merry Christmas, Miss McKenna,” the earnestness of it affected her.
“And Happy Christmas to you, Mr. Price,” she said. She glanced at the lively fire beyond the stone hearth. Neva had been right about that—it was warm as toast in the room.
“Did you fall out of bed?” Mr. Price asked pleasantly.
Aldine turned, patted at her hair, and wondered what kind of sight she was presenting. “Sir?”
“The alarming thump I heard a minute ago.” He was using a serious voice, but there was the smallest smile on his lips. “I thought maybe someone had fallen out of bed.”
“Oh, that then,” Aldine said and while wondering what mad concoction she might next speak, Neva interceded.
“It was just the book Aldine was reading before she went to sleep, Daddy. It fell on the floor when I woke her up.”
And with that, Neva was again pulling her by the hand and as Aldine happily allowed it, she cast an I-must-be-going smile back over her shoulder toward Mr. Price.
In the kitchen, Charlotte and Mrs. Price were busily gathering plates, slicing oranges, sliding hotcakes from skillet to platter, and shooing Clare away from the sausages warming on the stovetop.
“Out! Out!” Mrs. Price said to Clare, but her tone was jovial, and Clare, grinning happily at Aldine, grabbed a last sausage before escaping. Aldine joined the women in their work. A festive element had infected them all, none, to Aldine’s surprise, less than Mrs. Price. It was nearly too strange to accommodate—Aldine kept watching her from the corner of her eye. Was this what happened to her on Christmas Day but no other? The bounty of food doubtless had something to do with it, but there seemed to be something else as well, an almost eager element to her contentment, as if she were sitting on the pleasantest kind of secret, one that might soon be revealed.
After so many frugal meals, their breakfast felt like a banquet: small cobalt-blue bowls crowded with wedges of seedless oranges, shallow dishes full of jelly and marmalade. One platter packed with small sausages, another with hotcakes. Aldine followed the method of Clare and Neva, who spread their hotcakes with strawberry jelly (though Aldine chose orange marmalade), then wrapped each one around a sausage and ate it without aid of fork or knife.
“Heavenly,” she said, and Mrs. Price actually smiled at her compliment.
Mr. Price said, “Nice that”—he gave his wife a mysterious look—“Santa found us this year.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Mrs. Price said, very coylike, it seemed.
“I think it was a red-haired Santa,” Charlotte said, a notion that Aldine couldn’t fathom. Nor could Neva, who said, “There’s only one and he’s got white hair.”
They all ate then and for a time no one spoke. Finally Charlotte said, “Do you suppose you could eat like this every morning if you lived in California?”
“You could if you’re Tom Mix,” Clare said.
“Or William Randolph Hearst,” Mr. Price added, and even as Aldine was wondering who this William Somebody Hearst might be, he said to her, “This Hearst fellow’s a big newspaper tycoon.”
Neva was the first to finish eating, and thereafter sat monitoring the progress of others. Mr. and Mrs. Price were the most deliberate, but when at last they had put down their forks, Neva shouted, “Presents!”
Aldine expected Mrs. Price to insist that the dishes be washed first, but she didn’t. She merely nodded and followed the others into the front room. The gifts were simple and various, and of the
type, Aldine understood, that were given and received each year. Several ball-in-the-hole games. Found arrowheads. A rubber-band gun. A homemade Parcheesi board. Walnuts for cookies. Tangerines for all (Aldine received two). Aldine gave Neva a knitted long-legged frog and sang the first line of “Froggy went a courtin’ Oh” (and wanted, truly, to sing more but felt it would redirect too much attention). As a finale, Clare distributed propeller toys he had made and soon he, Neva, and Aldine were spinning their shafts between flattened hands and gleefully watching them twirl up into the air while Mr. Price stood at the hearth to prevent any wayward toys from a fiery ending.
When everything had settled again, Mr. Price began picking at his dulcimer, and soon was singing “Silent Night,” which teased a voice from everyone, even Mrs. Price. A few more carols followed and then a melody that sent a tremor through Aldine.
“Anyone know that one?” Mr. Price asked, and it took Aldine a moment to come to her senses. “It’s the ‘Carol of the Birds’ then, isn’t it?”
Mr. Price nodded and kept his eyes on the dulcimer. “I’m afraid I only know the melody,” he said. “I was hoping you would know the words.”
And so she sang, and she soon had everyone coming in on the beautiful, lilting chorus of “Curoo, Curoo, Curoo.”
Mr. Price didn’t stop after the last verse, so they went through it again, and this time when it was finished, the room fell into serene silence except for the occasional pop and snap from the fire.
Clare suggested a Parcheesi tournament and Mrs. Price said pleasantly, “Not before we have dishes done and dishes made.” She addressed the room as a whole. “We have two plump pheasant cocks that Ansel brought home,” she said, giving her husband the quickest nod, “and for that we’ll have a nice kumquat glaze.”
Her eyes were almost unnaturally bright with pleasure.
“It’s the most perfect Christmas ever!” Neva said, and Mrs. Price, nodding, said, “Yes, and there’s more to come.”
Mr. Price, who had just laid his dulcimer into its case, lifted his eyes. “More to come, Ellie?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded.
“More than pheasant for dinner?”
Again she nodded.
He took this in. “Well, don’t keep us from it then,” he said, and Aldine sensed that his mild tone was wrapped about something harder. “Not on Christmas morning.”
Mrs. Price had some sort of surprise for them, that was clear, but she seemed torn between sharing her secret and hanging on to it a bit longer. Aldine was sure she would wait—it was Mrs. Price’s nature to nurse on deprivation—but a look of resolution came into her face. “Yes,” she said. “Why not?” She was smiling now, smiling at each of her children. “Okay then. Just wait here.”
After she departed the room, Mr. Price laid more wood on the fire. It was clear that no one knew what might be coming next, but in a short time Mrs. Price returned with a small wooden crate, which she set down in the middle of the room. Her face was beaming. She took up the lid—the nails holding it had already been loosened—and laid it aside. Then, after one more expectant look at each of her children, she slowly began withdrawing small gifts from the straw packing.
“How did they get here?” Neva shouted. “Where did they come from?” The poor girl was in a state of near hysteria.
“St. Nick,” Mrs. Price said, and Neva at once replied, “No. Tell me! Where did they come from?”
“St. Nick,” Mrs. Price repeated, “and if you ask again, I’ll send them back to the North Pole.”
A strange exalted vibrancy had taken over the room, and as Mrs. Price handed out the gifts one by one, each recipient in turn beheld the package, turning it in the hand and regarding it from all angles with such slow brimming expectation that it seemed ceremonious. When Charlotte lifted away the lid from her small box, she found a powder-holder music box that, once she’d wound it, played the first few bars of a stately sonata. For Clare, there was a pair of Carl Zeiss military binoculars; for Neva, a small straw-stuffed monkey with a silver rivet imprinted Steiff on the cuff of its green velvet waistcoat; and for Mrs. Price, a double-stranded pearl necklace. “Why, they’re . . . exquisite,” she said in a tender voice as she stared down at them draping over her hands. “But where in the world would I wear them?”
Neva announced that her monkey’s name was Milly Mandy Molly, then began poking around in the straw packing of the crate until satisfied that nothing else lay hidden there. “If Santa brought the presents, how come he forgot Daddy and Miss McKenna?”
Mrs. Price didn’t seem to hear the question—she was transfixed by the pearls—so Charlotte said, “Santa didn’t know Miss McKenna was here, Nevie. And he knows Dad isn’t the type for fancy gifts, are you, Dad?”
“No, I’m not,” Mr. Price said, and for the first time Aldine became aware of the stiffness that had come over him.
Mrs. Price couldn’t keep her eyes off the necklace. Charlotte couldn’t, either. “At least put them on,” she coaxed, and when with a nod she acceded, Charlotte helped her with the clasp before standing away so all could see.
“Oh, they’re truly lovely,” Aldine said, but wished she hadn’t because Mrs. Price’s expression, which had drifted, came back into focus, and she reached behind her neck at once to unfasten the clasp.
“Can I try them on?” Neva pleaded, and Mrs. Price, while tucking the pearls neatly back into their velvet-lined case, said, “You certainly may not.”
So Neva wound her sister’s music box.
“Beethoven,” her mother said, and Mr. Price said something so low nobody could hear it.
“What?” Clare asked and Mr. Price, looking up, said more emphatically, “Mozart.”
“He’s right,” Charlotte said, reading something from the box. “Mozart Piano Sonata number 16.”
Why the good cheer had gone out of the room, Aldine was unsure. But it had. The room was heavily quiet now. Hot and heavily quiet. Aldine pinched her robe away from her chest for air. Mrs. Price set aside the boxed necklace, rose from her chair, and started for the kitchen. The last time she’d left the room, she’d seemed buoyant; now she seemed wary and deliberate.
“Ellie,” Mr. Price said.
Mrs. Price stopped and in just that moment of turning, her expression grew hard.
He scanned the presents in the room before letting his eyes settle again on his wife. “How did this come about?”
Mrs. Price didn’t wait. She said, “I wrote him.”
A moment passed. “And what did you tell him?”
“What do you think I told him, Ansel.” This was not a question. Her voice was low and even. “I told him that we were up against it. I told him that we didn’t have a thing for Christmas just like we didn’t have a thing last Christmas and the Christmas before that.”
She looked as if she might have more to say, but he didn’t wait to hear it. He turned and with his lips tight and jaw working and eyes cast straight forward, he walked out of the parlor and through the mud porch and out the yard gate. To the barn, Aldine supposed.
The stillness in the house felt brittle.
Finally, in her smallest voice, Neva said, “We did, too, have Christmas last year. I got . . .” but the dead, cold look in her mother’s eyes checked the girl.
Mrs. Price turned then to Charlotte. “Kitchen,” she said.
Charlotte rose. Neva did, too. Aldine supposed she would help as well, but Mrs. Price’s eyes narrowed on her. “And you,” she said, and even more than hearing the words, Aldine felt the hatred pulsing bloodlike within them. “You go upstairs and put some decent clothes on your body.”
28
Clare sat alone in an empty parlor that, minutes before, had been brimming with people and presents and good cheer. But it hadn’t been trustworthy good cheer. They’d found that out. His father had pulled the drain plug from the room and now there was nothing left.
Clare slipped his military binoculars into their leather case. They were made in Ge
rmany by the Carl Zeiss company, the same company that made Charlotte’s fancy camera. He had prized the binoculars, but that feeling wasn’t trustworthy, either, because now he saw that the gift was part of an insult to his father. Clare didn’t snap the case closed; the sound would be too loud. He looked toward the kitchen, where his mother, Neva, and Charlotte were cleaning up without talking. Then they would be making things without talking. He’d been looking forward to the roasted pheasant but he knew that was all spoiled now. He stared out toward the barn, where his father had gone. A loose mist hung low, and everything else was brown and cold and hard outside. He checked the stovepipe that poked from the side of the barn. His father would be getting a fire started in the stove, he supposed, but there was no smoke yet.
Clare took his field glasses and eased up the stairwell, where he had watched Aldine’s legs and hips as she rushed away in her nightgown and thin robe, up the stairs and out of sight, throwing her attic door closed behind her so everyone could hear. Then it had fallen quiet up there. He thought he would go up to her room. He would tell her in a quiet, solemn way that his mother was being bad-mannered to her. Worse than bad-mannered even. Monstrous. A declaration along those lines might coax her into tears, and tears might require comforting.
But when he reached the upstairs hallway, he was checked by sudden sounds exploding from the attic room, thuddings and reverberations, hard and furious seeming. She must have put on her thick lace-up shoes and was stomping here and there, slamming drawers, scraping the bedstead out of her way, perhaps even throwing things; that was anyhow what it sounded like. She didn’t need comforting. She needed calming, and that was a different task altogether.
All at once her door flew open. Clare stepped back into the shadows of his own room as her hard footsteps quickly descended and her form rushed by; then her shoes were again clacking hard on the wooden stairs and across the parlor floor. The mud porch door slammed closed behind her. Of all these sounds one was missing. She had not closed her attic door. Clare went to his bedroom window. He could see her marching through the low mist toward the barn, a kind of fierceness in her manner. She was going to quit. He could see it in her walk. She was going to demand to be paid and then she was going to quit. Smoke was rising now from the stack on the barn wall, so his father was definitely inside, working on something probably, tinkering, and then she would come in and he would look up and see her and she would demand her money and then whether she got it or not she would quit and then she would leave.
