From the first of December, it seemed to snow all the time. It piled up in great fluffy drifts and blanketed the streets, buried up the sidewalks and made foot travel an adventure. The grown-ups looked out the window after each new snowfall and moaned about it. In the morning when I was ready to leave for school, my grandmother bound and gagged me in layers of clothing thick enough to repel bullets, including a snowsuit made for a child with longer legs. I looked at myself in the hall mirror and saw a small Aleut with lumpy legs and little or no face. Still, it kept me warm. I had that snowsuit, a pair of black rubber boots with steel buckles, a cap with ear flaps that made me look like a trooper in the Red Chinese Army, a scarf wound some fifty times around my neck and mittens. Many mittens: I lost one a week for the duration of the winter, and my grandmother eventually gave up trying to help me keep them and simply bought me duplicate pairs.
Nor were my mittens the only things I lost; when I look back upon the various stages of my life, each has a salient characteristic. The hallmark of this one is that I lost things, all sorts of things: my rosary, a tie, my books, my boots, my mittens, socks and underwear if I went swimming at the Hamlin Park pool, toys and school supplies, the myriad accoutrements of youth—I lost them all. I developed a half-serious belief that somewhere in the universe God was collecting the things I lost in a huge pile that would eventually rival the pyramids, that someday many years from now I’d happen upon this trove and be rich as Croesus.
A couple of weeks into December, Grandma entrusted me with my first task: she gave me a quarter and sent me to the corner grocery store for a quart of milk. The store was less than three hundred feet from our house, as the crow flies. I lost the quarter before I was halfway there. I returned, sobbing, and she gave me another quarter.
That night she and I laughed over my incompetence. The following day she sent me to the store with a dollar. I lost it while scratching my name in the snow with a mitten, which I also lost.
In spite of the steady drain on their income caused by my habit of losing money as soon as I made it past the door, they managed to put together a Christmas. We had a tree, though not without controversy, as my grandparents reenacted a little drama I’d once witnessed between my mother and father.
On my last Christmas with my parents, our tree had been the cause of no small discord between my mother and father. As nearly as I can understand it, my father had stopped for a few drinks at Liquor Town with his cronies and then gone out to select a Christmas tree—normally, for him, a complicated task rich in the essential matter of American business: that is to say, it involved cutthroat negotiations between two parties intent on swindling one another if given a chance.
He never bought the first tree he liked, never agreed to the price written on the tag, never accepted the word of the tree-seller about the age, variety, or health of the tree. As a result, he always came home with a magnificent tree and beamed as he told my mother what he’d paid for it. On this occasion, however, fortified by whatever he’d consumed at the saloon, he went on down to the lot in front of Riverview Park, lost his reserve and most of his judgment, and bought a tree.
In fairness to my father, it was a singular tree, even a small boy could see that: primitive people had worshipped trees like this, the Vikings had made great ships of them. As we stared, my father wrestled with its weight, falling against the doorjamb twice. It was perhaps eleven feet tall so that its spiky top was bent double against our ceiling. It was dark green and long-needled and wrapped in thick brown twine like an arboreal mummy, and when my father cut the twine, the lower branches sprang out in a green explosion and the Viking tree revealed its true dimensions: it was bigger than the living room, it consumed the living room. And, joy to a small boy, it had pine cones, it was festooned with pine cones, they dangled like little treasures and dropped from its upper branches and went bouncing across our floor as I scurried around to collect them.
“Good God,” my mother said, and the tone in her voice said she wasn’t praying. My father was ready for her, he’d prepared a brief speech while dragging the great tree down Clybourn Avenue that might have been effective if he’d been sober enough to pronounce even a handful of standard English words. The gist of it was that he had taken one look at this tree—from nearly a block away, he said, so easily did it stand out from its hundreds of fellows—and fallen in love with it. There was also something about buying it for her, to please her, and I saw right off that this was ill-advised.
I looked up from my pinecone collecting and saw my mother staring at him. My father was red-faced and his eyes bulged slightly and from the way he kept wetting his lips, I thought he must be thirsty. I remember him trying to hold the tree still, not realizing that it was swaying because he was, and when he was finished with his little address, he turned and bestowed a fond look on the tree. My mother watched him for a moment and pronounced the tree “a monstrosity.”
“A mustrosophy?” he responded in his newfound language. “Wha’s wrong with it?” My mother had then cleared her throat, put a sweet look on her face, and launched into a detailed and comprehensive listing of the tree’s faults.
“It is too big for our living room,” she began, speaking in a very precise way, like a grown-up giving unpleasant news to a very small child. “It is crooked, it is uneven, the trunk is too thick for our tree stand, I think it’s too big for any tree stand I’ve ever seen, it’s got more bald spots than Eisenhower’s head, it’s losing needles. It is ugly, very ugly. And it has pinecones. I hate pinecones.”
“They’re kinda nice, hon.”
She shook her head. “Not in my house.”
“Aw, now, just gimme my saw and I can cut ’er down a little and she’ll look just fine up against the front window there.” I tried to picture this leviathan of trees in the living room and decided it might work out if we could manage to live in the back half of the flat for a month.
“It’ll look real nice,” he went on, never knowing when to stop.
“If you put that shaggy thing in my living room, you’d better count on sleeping in there with it.”
He gave her a long look, blinked twice, wet his lips again and shrugged. “Well, what can I do now, sugar? I can’t take it…”
She nodded. “Yes, you can. Take it back. He’ll give you another tree for the money. How much did that…no, wait, I don’t want to know, if you tell me, I’ll die. Just get it out of here.”
My father gave the big tree a moonstruck look and then caught my eye. He raised his eyebrows in a mute request for my personal assessment and I just smiled, aware that my mother was looking in my direction now. I scuttered out of the room and, at the doorway to my bedroom, stole a glance at them. They stared at one another from across the great tree and my father was no longer smiling, not at her, nor at his beloved tree.
Eventually he buttoned up his topcoat and prepared to wrestle the tree back down the stairs. Now that he had cut the twine, it no longer fit conveniently, and it sprayed dead green needles like a machine gun when he forced it out into our hall. By the time he had it out, the floor was covered with them, he was sweating and muttering and even daring the occasional profanity. I wondered if we would have a Christmas after all. From the hall he yelled in that he had lost his hat, his new fedora that had come in a big round black box with the word “Stetson” on it. I could tell he was yelling to make my mother feel bad, but she just yelled back that the hat was caught in the top branches of his dear tree and not to stop at any more taverns before he came home. At one point I think he and the tree fell on the stairs, and I heard him cursing as he struggled with his sylvan opponent, but my mother was already humming as she began sweeping up the needles. Whatever had suddenly brought her the joy of the season had escaped me, and then it occurred to me that my father would not be back. I began to cry.
“What’s wrong? Are you scared because Mommy and Daddy had a little argument?”
“No
. Daddy’s gone. I want Daddy to come back.”
“He’s coming back. People…people just have arguments, more at Christmas than any other time. I read that in the paper but I would have known it anyway. All families have arguments at Christmastime. Except the Jewish people,” she said in a more musing tone. “Maybe they’re lucky they don’t celebrate Christmas. Anyway, he’ll be back. And when he comes back, he’ll have a nice tree.”
And when he came home an hour later, sobered and holding up a more modest specimen of the conifer family, she nodded and complimented him on the return of his usual excellent taste in trees. She turned to me and said, “Nobody knows a Christmas tree like your father. I’ll bet that’s the most perfect tree on the lot.”
He snorted, but after a few minutes a satisfied smile appeared on his face and eventually he found a moment to give me a wink and nod in the direction of the new tree, an eight-foot balsam that filled the small flat with its Christmas perfume. My mother crossed the room and pretended to be fiddling with the needles. She turned slowly and gave him a long look, and I couldn’t see her face but I’m now certain what the look said, and my father wasn’t drunk anymore, at least not so one would notice. She gave him a fast kiss and stepped back just as he grabbed for her, saying, “You’ll drop the tree.”
For the rest of the night they wrestled with the tree and the tree stand, dug out lights and ornaments, helped me hang tinsel. They had put on music, Bing Crosby and some other people, and each time I looked at my mother it seemed that she might break into a little dance, and I wondered if she could be this happy over a simple tree.
So, too, I was to learn, my grandfather apparently made the occasional misstep in this annual ritual; perhaps this was a lapse in sense that occurred in all men. The tree that Grandpa Flynn brought into his home my first Christmas in his care was a far cry from the Viking tree. It was four feet tall, listed to one side like a rowboat taking water and bore the many signs that in a human being would have indicated a hard life. It had several bare branches and a spot on one side where it had nothing at all, neither branch nor needle nor stump to indicate that any had ever been there.
I was to go more than thirty years before seeing another tree like my grandfather’s, and when I did, it would be in a picture. It was in National Geographic, in an article about radiocarbon dating, and the role in this process of a tree called “The world’s oldest living thing,” the bristlecone pine. Thunderstruck when I came across it, I studied the photograph for ten minutes to be sure, and there is now no doubt in my mind that what my grandfather had unwittingly brought into the house that December night in 1954 was a three-thousand-year-old pine tree. And, like my father in that earlier time, he stood in the doorway with his purchase and struck a proud pose for his wife.
But unlike my mother in that previous conflict, my grandmother did not say anything. She made a little squawk and my grandfather actually jumped. I sniffed at the tree from a foot or so away and detected a well-known smell but not the smell of balsam or pine sap. My unfortunate grandfather had gone to Miska’s tavern on Belmont before going out to choose his tree, and what he’d done there had dulled his mental acuity, and he had come back with this gnarled little denizen of barren climes.
He frowned at her and said, “Now what’s wrong with you?”
“With me? What’s wrong with me? No, sir, what’s wrong with you? What have you brought into my house?”
“It’s a Christmas tree, for God’s sake.”
“It isn’t.”
“I’tis.” He regarded the tree for a moment and then came out with what the years have taught me is the clearest admission in the language that a Christmas tree is in some way deficient: he pronounced it “a cute little tree.”
“Driftwood, someone’s gone and sold you.”
“It only cost a dollar.”
“Who got the dollar, you or him?”
“Now what do you think?”
“I think if I live to be a thousand I’ll never see an uglier tree, nor a man with less sense.”
“Ah, you’re never satisfied,” and Grandpa punctuated his statement by thumping the tree’s gnarly trunk onto the floor, an act which precipitated a green flurry as it snowed needles onto Grandma’s carpet. I feared that if he did it once more, the tree would be naked.
“If you get one more needle on my floor, Patrick, I’ll brain you with that scrawny thing.”
“Fine talk for Christmas.”
“Christmas is not for ten days, and you may yet live to see it, but not if you thump that thing on the floor again.”
“And what would you have me do with it, then?”
“Throw it into the lake, and you riding it like a broomstick.”
“Ah, you’d know about broomsticks.”
“Or maybe you and the snake that sold it to you can both…”
“Woman, give me some peace! I’ll take it back.”
For some reason, this response seemed to mollify her and she just stood there, studying the tree and squinting at it.
“I’ll get my money back and get you something bigger,” he said, then muttered something about her “always needing the biggest, nothing is ever good enough for her ladyship,” but he was already backing into the doorway, like Lee’s defeated infantry.
“Oh, bring it back in, Patrick. It’s here and you don’t need to be out hiking around in a blizzard for another tree.” I was about to point out that it really wasn’t snowing at all but caught a certain look in her eye and thought better of it. “We’ll fix it up and no one will know you’ve been sold a pine walking stick and thought it was a tree.” With that, she left the room.
That night, we worked on the tree. We did not so much decorate the tree as camouflage it—with lights, tinsel, my grandma’s treasured ornaments, decoration enough for a tree four times the size of this bristlecone pine, and then my uncles constructed a little wooden “extension” below the tree stand. We covered this with the cotton batting that my grandmother used as a tree skirt, and when we were done, the tree was not only closer to five feet tall but dressed up like a grand duke. When this miraculous transformation was finished, Grandpa turned off the light and we stood there in a little cluster, my uncles and grandparents and me, and we went through the ancient, silent ceremony that occurs for a least a minute or two in every house that takes in a tree at Christmas, no matter how the rest of their life is going. After a while, I watched them.
I had seen this little rite in my parents’ house but never here, and as I glanced from face to face I saw the play of different emotions on them: I saw the same childlike glow that had crossed the faces of my mother and father, and more complicated things as well: I saw hope and worry and regret, and understood perhaps for the first time that this holiday would be different for them as well, try as they might to make it like all the others.
But try they did. For the next two weeks they nearly killed themselves in the daunting task of putting together a Christmas that would allow me to forget that my parents were dead. This was impossible, of course, though if there was a season when a newly orphaned child could suspend knowledge of his reality, it was Christmas. Dark fearful moments still came just before I dropped off to sleep, and on some afternoons when I was home from school and my grandfather fumbled at my mother’s task of putting together a snack for me in the empty kitchen, I understood that for me everything had changed, that my parents were truly never coming back.
At times this knowledge frightened me, at other times I cried quietly and hoped no one would notice—I understood that my tears would cause them pain and did everything I could to avoid that. Even so, several times my grandparents or my uncles found me crying in a room by myself, once in a bedroom with the light off, and at these times they treated me as a fragile, wounded creature. The first couple of times, I enjoyed the extra attention, but I soon grew to hate how it made me feel.
Chris
tmas 1954
Eventually we had Christmas, and it was in its way as memorable as any. They did their best to keep to my parents’ routine, so that on Christmas Eve, Uncle Tom brought me over to Grandma Dorsey’s house, where madness reigned in the basement flat on Evergreen Street. We crept down the worn stairs and he knocked on the door. Inside we could hear a dense murmur of many voices and occasional laughter, and for a moment it seemed that this was how we’d spend our Christmas Eve, standing outside Grandma Dorsey’s little flat and listening to others celebrate Christmas. Uncle Tom persisted, each time rapping a little harder and finally kicking the door and yelling, “Open up! Police!” The noise died as though shot, and I heard someone mutter something. Then the door swung open and my Aunt Ellen, the oldest of the Dorsey children, stepped into the doorway and squinted out at us.
“A couple of strange men,” she said in her pretend-hard voice, and then she came out and hugged Uncle Tom. She planted a dark red kiss on his cheek and then bent down and did the same to me.
“Merry Christmas, sugar,” she said.
Aunt Ellen led us in and yelled, “Hey, look what Santa left on Ma’s doorstep,” and everyone laughed and yelled, “Merry Christmas,” a woman’s voice called out something about the big one being homely but the short one being “kinda cute” and I saw my cousin Matt waving at me. I couldn’t see the room for the wall of people.
There were almost two dozen of them crammed into Grandma Dorsey’s little flat by the tracks, all my father’s brothers and sisters and their families—my cousins, some close, others little more than acquaintances—more people in that tiny cluster of subdivided rooms than anyone could imagine, and it was all perfect. I tried to ignore the way they looked at me when I came in, as though they were just now recollecting why their brother would not be there. But it was Christmas Eve among the Dorseys, the looks passed quickly, and then it was just as I remembered from the years before, nothing had changed. I heard music, they all seemed to be talking at once, and it smelled of food—there was a ham and a turkey and platters of half a dozen other things, cakes and trays of tarts and a mince pie and huge bowls of the cookies Grandma Dorsey made day and night during the month of December, like a baker on piecework. And it was hot, from her tiny radiators all clanking and hissing and from the two dozen bodies, and the air was almost wet with ladies’ perfume and men’s aftershave.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 11
