by New Yorker
Some elemental, mournful triangle seems sketched: my grandparents, those distant, grave, friendly adjuncts, are absent from the room as I remember it. My parents are above me, the presents shorn of wrapping are around me, the three-rail Lionel tracks are by my knees, the tree with its resiny scent presses close. I have no memory of what I did receive that Christmas—the wooden skis, perhaps, with leather-strap bindings that never held, or a shiny children’s classic that would stay unread. I feel, for a moment, the triangle flip: through the little velvety box of cards I see my parents in their poverty, their useless gentility, their unspoken plight of homelessness, their clinging to each other through such tokens, and through me. I become in my memory their parent, looking down and precociously grieving for them.
Captured in this recollection, I want to look out the window for relief, at the vacant lot next to our house, at the row houses opposite. If there was no white Christmas, there was at least a public Christmas, a free ten-o’clock cartoon show at the Shillington movie theatre, followed by a throng of us children lining up at the town hall to receive a box of chocolates from the hands of Sam Reich, the fat one of the three town policemen. I remember eating these chocolates, trying to avoid the ones with cherries at their centers, while walking up Philadelphia Avenue with the other children as they noisily boasted of their presents—I seeming to be, as one sometimes is in a dream, tongue-tied.
1997
(photo credit 7.2)
(photo credit 7.3)
A FINE TURKEY DINNER
BRENDAN GILL
Father Hagerty sat at his desk in the bay window of the rectory parlor stacking, in precarious piles, the nickels and dimes of the annual Christmas collection. This little hoard had been gathered at Mass the previous Sunday in order to buy, according to parish custom, a fine turkey dinner for the rectory household—Father Hagerty; his curate, Father Cain; and his housekeeper, Mrs. Katharine O’Degnan Malone. Father Hagerty added coin to coin in mixed discouragement and hope. After setting aside four dollars for the dinner, he planned to turn over the rest of the collection to a fund he had fostered in secret for several years. Sooner or later he would have the means to buy a new Saint Anthony to stand by the sacristy door. The plaster fingers of the present Saint Anthony, who was twelve years old, were beginning to chip.
Father Hagerty had placed his desk in the bay window twenty years before. He called it his lighthouse, since from it, as he worked on parish records and reports—he had long ago given up preparing sermons—he could keep an eye on the doings of the town. Barnardsville’s Main Street ran directly in front of the rectory. Across the street stood Dodd’s garage, where everyone gathered in the early morning to discuss the temperature, a various topic in a town built among the hills; and just beyond the church stood O’Connor’s general store, where everyone gathered in the early evening to discuss the temperature again and to make a pattern of the long, lazy day. Now, as he totted up his sums, Father Hagerty watched his parishioners walking home from work. It was impossible, with the dusk falling, to make out faces, but he nodded to everyone and everyone nodded in return. Father Hagerty supposed that a few of those to whom he nodded were Protestants, but even they, in this town, made good friends.
From the racket of pots and dishes in the kitchen, Father Hagerty guessed it was time he washed his hands. He had, after all these years, given up telling time by the clock. Mrs. Malone woke him as she entered the house at seven every morning. He got up to the sound of the kettle’s being set on the stove to boil. He shaved to the sound of places being laid for Father Cain and him on the naked dining-room table. It was like that all day. Now it could hardly be earlier than six, for at that hour Mrs. Malone reached the noisy climax of her preparations for supper. Father Hagerty swept the neat piles of coins into a heap in the middle of the desk.
The collection totalled twelve dollars and twenty-five cents. Eight dollars and twenty-five cents of that amount could be hidden in Father Hagerty’s fund. The Saint Anthony on whom he had his eye, pictured in color in a catalogue in the bottom drawer of the desk, was priced at one hundred and ten dollars, plus the cost of shipping. Five more years, Father Hagerty figured, should find him at his goal. He nodded with satisfaction. As he got up from the desk, he caught sight of young Father Cain on the path outside. Father Hagerty shook his head. His new curate worried him; the boy was too thin. He stepped into the hall to meet him as he opened the front door. Father Cain’s lips were blue with cold.
“No muffler?” Father Hagerty asked severely.
“I didn’t know how cold it was, Father.”
“Coldest town in Connecticut. I told you that when the Bishop sent you up here this fall.”
“I’m sorry, Father.” Father Cain had been ordained in June. He still felt humble in front of other priests and stared at them in wonder when they bowed to him and called him Father.
“How’s Mrs. O’Donaghue?”
Father Cain tried to smile. “She’s like all the rest. She wants you, of course. She knows you don’t think she’s very sick if you only send me.”
“Don’t let that worry you. She’ll be up and in the thick of it Christmas morning, now she’s had a priest to talk to.”
Father Cain said, “You can feel Christmas! The whole town’s excited about it. Everybody’s got a tree and lights on it and the kids all say ‘Hello, Father’ to me very carefully and you can see the cars coming back from Hartford and Waterbury full of packages.” His eyes widened. “It’s really here.”
Father Hagerty studied the banister of the stairs. “This is your first Christmas away from home, isn’t it? There’s always a first one, you know.”
Father Cain kept smiling. “Yes, Father.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Father Hagerty said. “Why shouldn’t you go home? It’s only forty miles. You can take my Ford. No reason for staying here. I won’t hear of anything else.”
The boy shook his head. His lips were still a little blue. “I want to stay. I want to say my first Christmas Mass here.”
Father Hagerty climbed the stairs, resting his weight heavily on each step. “We’re having a fine turkey dinner. Mrs. Malone always gives us a real old-fashioned Christmas, with all the trimmings.” He looked down on Father Cain from the second floor. “I hope we have snow, too. It always makes it seem more like Christmas to me. Do you think we will?”
(photo credit 8.1)
“Feels like it, Father,” the boy said.
Father Cain offered Mass at nine o’clock on Christmas morning, Father Hagerty at eleven. Everyone said “Merry Christmas, Father” to Father Cain as he stood in the back of the church after each Mass. From twelve until one, Father Hagerty and he sat in the parlor and waited for Mrs. Malone to call them into the dining room. There was hardly anything to talk about. Father Cain’s family had sent him, by mail, a sweater, some books, and a pair of skis, of which he felt ashamed. Father Hagerty’s sister had knitted him woollen socks. “She always makes them too big in the heel,” Father Hagerty had said. “I’ve got twenty pairs of them up in the drawer. She’s a good girl.” Father Hagerty had given Father Cain a pipe and Father Cain had given Father Hagerty a box of cigars. They were embarrassed by the similarity of their gifts. It seemed easier to say nothing about them.
“All right, Father,” Mrs. Malone said finally. She stood in the doorway in a clean apron, wiping her clean hands. “The bird looks like leather. You ought to give Tim Bowen a piece of your mind.”
“You always say that, Mrs. Malone. It wouldn’t seem natural to sit down at the table if you didn’t.”
The dining room faced north, toward the green spruce woods that bordered the town. In spite of the four candles making a square of light on the table, the room was dark. Father Hagerty sat down, folded his hands, and recited, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which of Thy bounty we are about to receive. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.” Then he sipped his tomato juice. “It didn’t snow,” he said.
Father Cain shook his
head. “No. Most Christmases, I guess, it doesn’t.” He spoke hurriedly, ignoring his tomato juice. “I remember I got a Flexible Flyer for Christmas once and there wasn’t any snow. I wanted to take it out and try it on the bare ground. I couldn’t wait.”
Father Hagerty looked at the boy. “You can’t, when you’re a kid.”
“We always buy a tree the first day they come in. Mom and Dad and all of us go down and pick out the biggest one we can find. Then, on Christmas Eve, we set it up in the hall by the stairs, where there’s room for it, no matter how high it is. Sometimes we get one so high we have to go up on the second floor to put the star on its top.”
“That’s a real tree.”
“You should see it. Then, about midnight, everybody goes up to his room and gets the presents he’s bought, all wrapped up in green and red paper, and brings them down and puts them under the tree. Everyone has a special pile. We always try to see who has the biggest pile, but they’re usually just about the same. We’ve caught Mom sneaking extra presents into any pile that looks a little smaller than the rest.”
Mrs. Malone entered and removed the tomato-juice glasses. She frowned at the talkative Father Cain but said nothing. Then she carried the turkey to the table, a thin brown turkey on a mended porcelain platter.
Father Hagerty rubbed his chin. “It does look a little small,” he said.
“What did I tell you?” Mrs. Malone demanded. “That Tim Bowen!”
“And the next morning,” Father Cain said, “Christmas morning, we all get up in the dark and go down and open our presents.”
“Thirty-eight cents a pound for meat like that,” said Mrs. Malone.
“Which do you prefer, dark meat or light?” asked Father Hagerty.
Father Cain swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. He got up and walked carefully from the room. Father Hagerty and Mrs. Malone turned to follow the sound of his feet on the stairs. As the door of his bedroom closed behind him, Mrs. Malone sucked in her breath. “They’re all the same. Next year he’ll tuck it in fast enough.”
Father Hagerty cut off a leg of the turkey with some difficulty and put it on his plate. “He doesn’t know that now,” he said. He was thinking he might just as well have added the cost of the turkey to his secret fund. He might have brought Saint Anthony a half year nearer the faded pedestal in the church. The meat was tough, all right.
1939
STARE DECISIS
H. L. MENCKEN
Despite all the snorting against them in works of divinity, it has always been my experience that infidels—or freethinkers, as they usually prefer to call themselves—are a generally estimable class of men, with strong overtones of the benevolent and even of the sentimental. This was certainly true, for example, of Leopold Bortsch, Totsäufer* for the Scharnhorst Brewery, in Baltimore, forty-five years ago, whose story I have told, alas only piecemeal, in various previous communications to the press. If you want a bird’s-eye view of his character, you can do no better than turn to the famous specifications for an ideal bishop in I Timothy III, 2–6. So far as I know, no bishop now in practice on earth meets those specifications precisely, and more than one whom I could mention falls short of them by miles, but Leopold qualified under at least eleven of the sixteen counts, and under some of them he really shone.
He was extremely liberal (at least with the brewery’s money), he had only one wife (a natural blonde weighing a hundred and eighty-five pounds) and treated her with great humanity, he was (I quote the text) “no striker … not a brawler,” and he was preëminently “vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach.” Not once in the days I knew and admired him, c. 1900, did he ever show anything remotely resembling a bellicose and rowdy spirit, not even against the primeval Prohibitionists of the age, the Lutheran pastors who so often plastered him from the pulpit, or the saloonkeepers who refused to lay in Scharnhorst beer. He was a sincere friend to the orphans, the aged, all blind and one-legged men, ruined girls, opium fiends, Chinamen, oyster dredgers, ex-convicts, the more respectable sort of colored people, and all the other oppressed and unfortunate classes of the time, and he slipped them, first and last, many a substantial piece of money.
Nor was he the only Baltimore infidel of those days who thus shamed the churchly. Indeed, the name of one of his buddies, Fred Ammermeyer, jumps into my memory at once. Fred and Leopold, I gathered, had serious dogmatic differences, for there are as many variations in doctrine between infidels as between Christians, but the essential benignity of both men kept them on amicable terms, and they often coöperated in good works. The only noticeable difference between them was that Fred usually tried to sneak a little propaganda into his operations—a dodge that the more scrupulous Leopold was careful to avoid. Thus, when a call went out for Bibles for the paupers lodged in Bayview, the Baltimore almshouse, Fred responded under an assumed name with a gross that had to be scrapped at once, for he had marked all the more antinomian passages with a red, indelible pencil—for example, Proverbs VII, 18–19; John VII, 7; I Timothy V, 23; and the account of David’s dealing with Uriah in II Samuel XI. Again, he once hired Charlie Metcalfe, a small-time candy manufacturer, to prepare a special pack of chocolate drops for orphans and ruined girls, with a deceptive portrait of Admiral Dewey on the cover and a print of Bob Ingersoll’s harangue over his brother’s remains at the bottom of each box. Fred had this subversive exequium reprinted many times, and distributed at least two hundred and fifty thousand copies in Baltimore between 1895 and 1900. There were some Sunday-school scholars who received, by one device or another, at least a dozen. As for the clergy of the town, he sent each and every one of them a copy of Paine’s “Age of Reason” three or four times a year—always disguised as a special-delivery or registered letter marked “Urgent.” Finally, he employed seedy rabble rousers to mount soap boxes at downtown street corners on Saturday nights and there bombard the assembled loafers, peddlers, and cops with speeches which began seductively as excoriations of the Interests and then proceeded inch by inch to horrifying proofs that there was no hell.
But in the masterpiece of Fred Ammermeyer’s benevolent career there was no such attempt at direct missionarying; indeed, his main idea when he conceived it was to hold up to scorn and contumely, by the force of mere contrast, the crude missionarying of his theological opponents. This idea seized him one evening when he dropped into the Central Police Station to pass the time of day with an old friend, a police lieutenant who was then the only known freethinker on the Baltimore force. Christmas was approaching and the lieutenant was in an unhappy and rebellious frame of mind—not because he objected to its orgies as such, or because he sought to deny Christians its beautiful consolations, but simply and solely because he always had the job of keeping order at the annual free dinner given by the massed missions of the town to the derelicts of the waterfront and that duty compelled him to listen politely to a long string of pious exhortations, many of them from persons he knew to be whited sepulchres.
“Why in hell,” he observed impatiently, “do all them goddam hypocrites keep the poor bums waiting for two, three hours while they get off their goddam whimwham? Here is a hall full of men who ain’t had nothing to speak of to eat for maybe three, four days, and yet they have to set there smelling the turkey and the coffee while ten, fifteen Sunday-school superintendents and W.C.T.U. sisters sing hymns to them and holler against booze. I tell you, Mr. Ammermeyer, it ain’t human. More than once I have saw a whole row of them poor bums pass out in faints, and had to send them away in the wagon. And then, when the chow is circulated at last, and they begin fighting for the turkey bones, they ain’t hardly got the stuff down before the superintendents and the sisters begin calling on them to stand up and confess whatever skulduggery they have done in the past, whether they really done it or not, with us cops standing all around. And every man Jack of them knows that if they don’t lay it on plenty thick there won’t be no encore of the giblets and stuffing, and two times out of three the
re ain’t no encore anyhow, for them psalm singers are the stingiest outfit outside hell and never give a starving bum enough solid feed to last him until Christmas Monday. And not a damned drop to drink! Nothing but coffee—and without no milk! I tell you, Mr. Ammermeyer, it makes a man’s blood boil.”
Fred’s duly boiled, and to immediate effect. By noon the next day he had rented the largest hall on the waterfront and sent word to the newspapers that arrangements for a Christmas party for bums to end all Christmas parties for bums were under way. His plan for it was extremely simple. The first obligation of hospitality, he announced somewhat prissily, was to find out precisely what one’s guests wanted, and the second was to give it to them with a free and even reckless hand. As for what his proposed guests wanted, he had no shade of doubt, for he was a man of worldly experience and he had also, of course, the advice of his friend the lieutenant, a recognized expert in the psychology of the abandoned.
First and foremost, they wanted as much malt liquor as they would buy themselves if they had the means to buy it. Second, they wanted a dinner that went on in rhythmic waves, all day and all night, until the hungriest and hollowest bum was reduced to breathing with not more than one cylinder of one lung. Third, they wanted not a mere sufficiency but a riotous superfluity of the best five-cent cigars on sale on the Baltimore wharves. Fourth, they wanted continuous entertainment, both theatrical and musical, of a sort in consonance with their natural tastes and their station in life. Fifth and last, they wanted complete freedom from evangelical harassment of whatever sort, before, during, and after the secular ceremonies.
