by Luanne Rice
“We’re going to see Danny now, Pa,” Bridget said. “You should be happy.”
He’d been grimacing. He tried to relax his face, so as not to upset her. But he hurt so much inside; the harder he tried to look calm, the more he felt her hopes rising, and with the one single postcard from her brother, the deeper he felt the agony.
The hired eighteen-wheeler he’d loaded with the trees was waiting at the end of their road, great clouds of exhaust billowing into the cold clear air over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. When the driver spotted Christy’s pickup, he blasted the horn.
Christy pulled up behind the long-hauler, and they set off for their two-day journey to New York City.
2
The holiday season started earlier and earlier every year. Once it had been the day after Thanksgiving—the unofficial day that Manhattan would start to put up decorations. Now, Catherine Tierney thought, it seemed to happen in October—even as the greenmarkets were overflowing with pumpkins and grocery shelves were laden with Halloween candy. The city began to dress in its winter finery, weighting Catherine’s soul a little more each day.
All through November Catherine had watched tiny, twinkling white lights appearing in midtown shop windows. Bell-ringing Santas would clang away, standing in front of Lord & Taylor and Macy’s as passersby stuffed their cast-iron kettles with dollar bills. Salvation Army bands would start playing “Silent Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” outside Saks Fifth Avenue to the captive audience of people lined up to see the famous holiday windows. Squeezing past the crowd, Catherine kept her face stoic, so no one could see what the carols were doing to her heart.
By the first week of December, the city was in full holiday swing. Hotels were filled with shoppers and people in town to see City Ballet’s Nutcracker, Radio City’s Christmas show, Handel’s Messiah, and of course, the Rockefeller Center tree. The avenues crept with yellow cabs, and on her way to the subway, Catherine would be jostled by wall-to-wall people inching along in their thick coats.
Catherine Tierney worked as a librarian in a private library owned by the Rheinbeck Corporation. The Rheinbecks had made their fortune in banking, and now real estate; they were philanthropists who supported education and the arts. The library occupied the fifty-fourth floor of the Rheinbeck building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, just across the Grand Army Plaza from Central Park.
The Rheinbeck Tower was fantastically gothic, with arched windows, pinnacles, flying buttresses, finials, and gargoyles, rising sixty stories to an ornate green cast-stone point. The offices, and Catherine’s library, had astonishing views of the park—the eight-hundred-and-forty-three-acre green haven in the city’s midst.
The building’s facade was lit year round, Paris style, with gold light. For the holidays, the illumination changed to red and green. The spectacular four-story barrel-vaulted lobby accommodated an enormous tree, covered with colored balls and lights. The Byzantine-style mosaics glistened like real gold, and evergreen roping garlanded the frescoed second-floor balconies.
Choirs sang carols in the lobby at lunchtime, a different city school group every day. That afternoon Catherine returned to work with her sandwich, and she paused to listen. The children’s voices joined together, sweet and pure.
One little girl in the back row was off-key. Catherine watched her, head thrown back with brown braids hanging down, mouth open wide, singing her heart out. The choir director shot the girl an ice-cold look and a hand signal, and suddenly the girl stopped—her eyes wide with dismay as they flooded with tears. Catherine’s stomach churned at the sight. She had to walk away, hurry upstairs, to keep from getting involved—telling the girl to keep singing, berating the director for squashing her spirit. That’s what Brian would have done.
The look in that girl’s eyes was with Catherine all day. From “Joy to the World” to the shock of being silenced. She felt the child’s shame in her own heart and for the rest of the day found it almost impossible to concentrate on her project—pulling up material from the archives on stone angels and gargoyles on buildings in Manhattan. She couldn’t wait to get home and put this day behind her.
At five-thirty, Catherine locked up and headed for the subway. She lived in Chelsea. Situated west of Sixth Avenue, roughly between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, that part of town had its own personality. Eighth Avenue was playful, shop and restaurant windows decorated with wreaths of red peppers, Santa in a sleigh drawn by eight flamingos, candles shaped like the Grinch and Betty Lou Who.
The side streets had a nineteenth-century feel, with many Italianate and Greek Revival brownstones set back from the sidewalk, their yards enclosed by ornate wrought-iron gates and lit by reproduction gas lamps.
Some residents decorated for the holidays as if Chelsea were still part of the estate of Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—with English holly, laurel, and evergreen roping, Della Robbia wreaths, red ribbons, and gold and silver balls. It was so understated that if you didn’t want to notice, you didn’t have to.
The minute Catherine stepped off the E train at Twenty-third and Eighth, she breathed a sigh of relief. The buildings were low, and she could see the sky. The air was frigid, crystal clear, and so dry that it hurt to draw a breath. She wore stylish boots and a short black wool coat; her knees and toes were cold as she hurried across West Twenty-second Street, on her way home.
At Ninth Avenue she turned south. The Christmas tree man had arrived again—she stopped short when she saw him there; her pulse felt like galloping horses. For a second, she considered crossing the street to avoid having to look him in the eye.
She had witnessed the scene with his son last year—and she had doubted that he would come back. But here he was, just setting up his display of spruce and pine, making the sidewalk smell like a mountain forest. The trees stretched a quarter of the way down the block of small stores—an antiquarian book dealer, two avant-garde clothes designers, a new bakery, a florist, and Chez Liz.
In a brilliant fit of quirkiness possible only in Chelsea, Lizzie sold hats, which she made, along with hard-to-find poetry books and antique tea sets. When she was in the mood, she would set the mahogany table inside with her Spode and Wedgwood china and serve tea to whoever walked in. Catherine felt so nervous, seeing the man, she dove at Lizzie’s door to duck inside. The shop was warmly lit by silk-shaded lamps, but the door was locked—Lizzie and Lucy had already left.
“She closed early tonight—left with the little one,” the tree man said, leaning against the makeshift rack of raw pine boards that held numerous wreaths, sprays, and garlands. “I asked her, beautiful as she looked in that black velvet hat with the one peacock feather sticking up, was she going to the opera? Or maybe something at the Irish Repertory Theater?” He nodded toward Twenty-second Street, where the theater was located.
“Hmm,” Catherine said, her palms damp inside her gloves, wanting to get away.
“She told me that she was going to ‘the banquet.’”
Catherine hid a smile. Lizzie would say that.
“What I think she’d say to you, if she was here,” he said, stamping his feet to keep them warm, his Irish brogue coming out in clouds, “is that you should buy a nice fresh Nova Scotia Christmas tree from me. And a wreath, for your front door. I see you walk by every day, and you look to me like someone who would fancy white spruce …”
The man was tall, with broad shoulders under a rugged canvas jacket. His hair was light brown, but even in the dark she could see it was grayer than it had been the year before. He had been warming his hands by a kerosene heater; he stepped closer to Catherine, and after what had happened last year, she leaned sharply back.
“I don’t want a white spruce,” Catherine said.
“No? Then maybe a hardy blue—”
“Or any other tree,” she said. She had had a headache ever since the carol incident in the lobby, and she just wanted to get home.
“Just look at these needles,�
�� he said, brushing a branch with one bare hand. “They’re as fresh as the day the trees were cut—they’ll never fall. And see how they glisten? That’s the Cape Breton salt spray … you know, it’s said that starlight gets caught in the branches, and …”
He paused in the midst of the sentence, trailing off as if he’d forgotten what he was saying or lost the heart for his spiel. Catherine had noticed his blue eyes sparkling during hard sells in the past, but tonight they were as dull as last week’s snow. They held her gaze for a moment, then looked down at the ground. She felt her heart pounding as she kept her face neutral so he couldn’t read her thoughts.
“Thank you anyway,” Catherine said, edging away.
As she walked home, she felt doubly uncomfortable. She was still upset about the little girl, and now she had to face the fact that the tree man would be in her neighborhood till Christmas Eve, and she’d probably have to change her route. She wondered whether his daughter had come with him this year. She hoped his son was somewhere warm. Her nose and fingertips stung with the cold. A December wind blew off the Hudson River, and when she turned right onto West Twentieth Street, she saw little clouds of vapor around the gaslights of Cushman Row.
In spite of the brutal chill, she paused to stare at the penumbra around one flickering lamp. The globe of light might have been due to moisture blowing off the river, forecasting a storm like a ring around the moon. It reminded Catherine of a ghost. It’s a harbinger, she thought and hoped as she clenched her freezing hands and walked on.
Chelsea was haunted at Christmas. Or at least one room in one townhouse, in the very middle of Cushman Row. Like its neighbors—other brick Greek Revivals with tall brownstone steps, pocket-sized yards, and ornate cast-iron railings—the house where Catherine lived had been built in 1840 by Don Alonzo Cushman, a friend of Clement Clark Moore.
Catherine paused, holding on to the iron railing and gazing at the brick house, four stories up to the small attic windows. Leaded glass, encircled by plaster wreaths of laurel leaves, they were one of the house’s prettiest, most charming features. The tiny panes of glass gave onto the sky. Strangers walking by often stopped to peer upward at those mysterious little windows.
People always made assumptions about other people’s lives. Catherine thought of passing strangers imagining happiness inside. Perhaps they gazed at the pretty townhouse and pictured elegant dinner parties going on. They would probably assume it belonged to a loving couple with brilliant children—perhaps their playroom was up in the attic, behind those small wreathed windows.
Why shouldn’t they imagine such things? Catherine had herself, at one time. Her eyes on those windows, she felt a cold tingle down her spine. It gripped her as if she were being electrocuted, wouldn’t let her move or look away. There were ghosts in the street tonight; she closed her eyes tight, trying to feel the one she loved, beg it to visit her tonight in the attic.
The season was here again. December, once such a source of joy and delight, had become a time of sorrow and pain—Catherine didn’t celebrate at all. It brought nothing but sad memories—she wanted to rush through the preholiday craziness.
Shaking herself free of the shiver and such thoughts, she ran up the front stairs to close the door behind her and pull the covers over her head.
A few blocks away Lizzie Donnelly stood behind the food table, wearing her dark-red brocade cape and black velvet hat. Steam rose from the food, misting her harlequin glasses. She had to keep taking them off and handing them to her nine-year-old daughter, Lucy, to wipe them, to make sure she wasn’t giving anyone too little food—not that she really had to worry: her clients would let her know.
“Thanks, honey,” Lizzie said.
“No problem, Mom. Keep dishing up the supper, though—everyone’s hungry,” Lucy said.
“Hi Joe, hey there Billy, hello Ruthie, what’s going on Maurice, are you being good, don’t want any coal in your stocking this year, right?” Lizzie kept up the banter, filling their plates with tonight’s delicacy—pot roast, mashed potatoes, and peas and carrots. The priest passed through the crowded room of St. Lucy’s soup kitchen on his way from the rectory to the church.
“Hey, Father,” several called.
“God bless, God bless,” he said, his clothes a black blur as he hurried along.
“What’ll you have?” Lizzie asked the next person in line. “May I suggest the pot roast? The chef has really outdone himself today.”
Lizzie volunteered here twice a week. She had been baptized at St. Lucy’s. So had her daughter, whom she had named after the church and Saint Lucy herself. She and her best friend, Catherine, had made their first communion together. They had gone all through grammar school, middle school, and high school together. Three years earlier Catherine had asked her to take Brian’s place at the soup kitchen. We have so much, and we have to give back, Brian had once said. Lizzie had agreed—how could she not? And so they had started.
Now Lizzie was alone with her ladle. Since Brian’s funeral, Catherine had refused to set foot in a church, even St. Lucy’s. Lizzie tried arguing, saying that technically the soup kitchen was in the parish hall, but even after three years Catherine was still too raw to listen to reason. Lizzie always expected her best friend’s heart to melt a little at Christmas, but in fact, it hardened.
“Peas and carrots, red and green,” Lucy said, standing off to the side.
“A little Christmas cheer,” Lizzie said, starting to sweat under her cape.
“Hey Lucy, hi Lizzie” came Harry’s voice.
“Harry!” Lucy said.
“Where’ve you been, Harry?” Lizzie asked, whipping around the table to give the tall man a hug. He let her crash into his body and actually held on for an instant, then pushed her away.
“Hey, knock it off,” he said, eyes darting back and forth at the men in line and hunched over their food at the long tables. “The guys’ll see.”
“So let them,” Lizzie said. “They’d all trade in their rice pudding for one hug from me. Seriously, where have you been? We were getting worried about you.”
“A little of this, a little of that,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Lucy asked.
“It sounds dangerous,” Lizzie said wryly. “Especially coming from you, Harry.” She scanned his face for clues to what was really going on. The street aged people beyond their years. Their eyes grew dull, their faces became lined from the sun and wind and stress, their bones curved and shrank from bad nutrition. Drugs became some people’s way out, their magic carpet to a better place, and the ticket sometimes cost their lives. Not Harry, not so far, Lizzie thought. If anything, his eyes looked brighter and sharper.
“I’ve got to get going,” he said, pulling an envelope from the back pocket of his torn and dirty jeans. “Will you give this to C?”
“Sure,” Lizzie said, accepting the message and giving him a curious look. “What’s inside?”
“She’ll know,” he said.
“She and I are having breakfast at the diner tomorrow. Why don’t you meet us there and give it to her yourself?” Lizzie asked, hoping to trick him into a free meal.
“I have an appointment,” he said, eyes dropping furtively. The way he said it made Lizzie’s stomach fall. She didn’t know what he did for money, and she realized she honestly didn’t want to know.
“Will you have a plate of food?” she asked. “It’s good tonight.”
He glanced at the meat and potatoes, and Lucy thrust a plate into his hands. Lizzie filled it up, piling on some extra pot roast. He sat at one end of a table and started to eat. Lizzie watched with satisfaction. He finished in record time, cleared his plate, and stopped to say good-bye.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Anytime. That’s what we’re here for.”
“You won’t forget to give that thing to C, will you?”
“No. You can count on me.”
Lizzie leaned forward to give him another hug—she was under orders to
do that as often as possible. Lucy did the same. But he was true to his name and disappeared into the crowd of people congregating at the door—savoring the last moments of warmth before heading back out into the cold night.
“Where’s he going, Mom?”
“To the shelter, honey. At least I hope so.”
Lizzie could only watch him leave. She tucked his envelope under her cape, wondering what it contained, and with a strange sense of melancholy smiled at her daughter and went back to presiding over the banquet.
Bridget Byrne sat at the end of the sofa, trying to do her schoolwork. She had the TV on low, so no one else could hear—she wasn’t allowed to watch until she had finished the assignments that her teacher in Nova Scotia had sent for that day. Not that there were too many around to notice, but Bridget could hear Mrs. Quinn in her rooms, shuffling around. Danny used to call her “old eagle eye,” because she was always watching.
That was one way Bridget and Danny were different. While Danny had always hated being supervised, Bridget loved it. It made her feel good to have someone pay attention, even the elderly owner of the boardinghouse. She felt that her mother would approve of Mrs. Quinn and her concern. In other years Danny had looked after her, too. They sometimes made friends, but it was hard in New York in the winter. Kids mostly stayed inside. Danny and Bridget had had each other.
In spite of missing Danny, Bridget liked it here. The heat rattled in the pipes, in the most comforting way, warming every room through. The wallpaper in the common room was old and yellowed, patterned with roses and forget-me-nots. The ceiling had a brownish cast, and Mrs. Quinn had told her it was from years of smoke. “This was a sailors’ boardinghouse, darling,” she’d said. “Longshoremen, stevedores, crew from the boats that stopped at the Chelsea docks, going back nearly two hundred years. They all smoked.”
