by Maeve Binchy
It was surprisingly easy for a single woman to buy a ticket to New York and ask a travel agency to book her a hotel room. Nobody asked her why she was going there. Elsa was an adult, she presumably had plans of her own, her own agenda.
Other passengers read their books, watched the movie or snoozed on the flight.
‘Have a good Christmas, you hear?’ the man at Immigration instructed her.
‘Enjoy your stay,’ ordered the man at Customs.
‘Best city in the world,’ volunteered the bus driver.
At the hotel the receptionist asked if she’d like a little Christmas tree in her room or not. ‘Some folks do, some folks want to forget the holiday, so we always ask,’ she said.
Elsa thought for a moment, ‘I’d love a little Christmas tree,’ she said. For five years she had not even placed a sprig of holly in her apartment at home.
She put on her comfortable shoes—she had already forgotten what time it was back in Britain—and went out to mix with the shoppers and the crowds coming home from work. She had heard that New York was a busy, frightening place where they pushed past you on the street, but the people seemed courteous to her, and smiled when they heard her accent.
She watched the skaters at Rockefeller Center and marvelled at the fairy lights twinkling on every tree along the huge avenues of Manhattan. She stared, fascinated, into the windows of the great department stores, and the lavish displays of gifts. Exhausted she returned to her own hotel and the individual tree trimmed in her honour by a young foreign chambermaid.
‘Do your family celebrate Christmas?’ Elsa asked. Back home she would never have asked a personal question about anyone’s background or culture. Perhaps being in New York was changing her personality.
‘Everybody love Christmas holidays, people are happy and good tempered,’ said the girl as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
At the reception desk they had a brochure advertising a Christmas Eve treat. It was a special tour: it began with children singing carols, then it took you around New York in a big bus pointing out the sights and the way various communities celebrated Christmas. There was a festive lunch and then a boat trip to blow away the cobwebs. They would go past the Statue of Liberty.
‘Do people make a wish there or is that in my imagination?’ Elsa asked.
‘I don’t know that they do, but then I was born and raised here so I wouldn’t know. Perhaps all visitors or first-time people seeing the Statue make a wish,’ answered the receptionist.
Elsa studied the tour again. It was certainly full of interest, but it was expensive. Then she remembered her magic money, the ten twenty-dollar bills she had not known she still had.
‘I’ll book it,’ she said.
There were twenty of them setting out: couples and people on their own. They each wore a paper name badge as big as a dinner plate. ‘Happy Christmas—I’m Elsa.’ Some of them photographed each other.
‘Shall I take one of you with your camera?’ a man asked Elsa. She didn’t like to tell him that there was nobody on the face of the earth to whom she would show such a picture, but he looked kind.
‘I’d love that,’ she said, not to disappoint him.
They got to know each other’s stories, the people on the tour: the Japanese couple whose son had been killed in the war over fifty years ago. They had corresponded over the years with an American couple whose son had been killed the same day. This was their first visit. Elsa looked at the four old people in their seventies sitting together in such solidarity and mystification at what had happened to them all half a century ago. It made her own problems seem small.
There was a mother and daughter who fought good-naturedly and almost automatically as they had done for a generation and would do for another. There was a scattering of people on their own, all extrovert, all able to talk as if they were old friends. The only quiet person was the man with the kind face who had taken Elsa’s photograph for her. He smiled as they passed places by. He looked as if he knew New York well, and might even be from the city, but that would be odd. Why would a native New Yorker take a guided tour of his own town?
Light snow began to fall as they approached the Statue of Liberty. Elsa looked at it with awe. You must be able to make a wish at a place like this, a symbol so important to so many people who had come to start a new life with hearts full of hope. She closed her eyes and wished that the children in her school would get a new hall.
‘It’s not a very important thing,’ she said, struggling to be fair, mouthing the words without realising it. ‘There must have been more important wishes made here, but I did promise the children I’d ask. And it would make a difference to music and concerts and everything as well as games. It’s not just for showing off, and there aren’t any funds left to build one, you see.’
She felt a camera flash; the man with the kind face had taken a picture of her.
‘You were praying so hard I wanted to record it for you,’ he said. He was easy to talk to. She told him about the hall and the schoolchildren back in London, and later when they were having eggnog in a tavern with the group she told him about Tim and how he had left her and about the dollars in the back of her passport.
And he told her about his friend Stefan, who had died six months ago. How every year on Christmas Eve, Stefan had come out to thank the Statue of Liberty for giving him a home in America, but that he had never been able to give Stefan a real home because his father was old and his mother frail and they could not take on board their only son having a friendship with a man. They still lived in hope that he would marry and that all their great wealth could be handed on to future generations.
He had never been able to spend Christmas Day with Stefan; for years he had sat, mute and miserable, trying to be cheerful for two elderly people who were disappointed in him, trying to put out of his mind the thought of Stefan sitting lonely and confused in an apartment drinking a bottle of vodka but assuring himself that he was loved even though it couldn’t be acknowledged.
So, every Christmas Eve they had been together and come out to salute the Statue of Liberty at the gate of New York’s harbour. And sometimes, Stefan played the violin to say thank you for being invited into America. People had smiled at him, some had thought it sentimental, some had thought it touching.
He had tears in his eyes as he spoke of Stefan and how he had promised him that one day he would build a great auditorium in his name so that everyone would know of him. He wouldn’t be one more immigrant, he would be a violinist who loved this city. But he couldn’t do it yet. Not yet while his parents were alive. He must allow them peace in their last years, months even. Stefan would understand.
‘Did he play in concerts?’ Elsa asked.
‘No, he taught music in a school,’ said the man with the kind face, and then suddenly they both knew how Stefan’s monument could be built and where. A hall with his name on could go up three thousand miles away. The children would be pleased but not astonished. Miss Martin made a wish, that was all. And Stefan could be honoured in another great city until the time was right for him to be acknowledged in New York, his own home town.
The Extended Family
THE WOMAN ON LIVELINE WAS BLEATING ON ABOUT THE Extended Family.
‘You see, Marian, that’s what’s really wrong with Ireland at the moment. I mean, nobody really cares anymore, not like they used to care in the old days. You know, Marian, it’s the whole concept of the extended family is missing.’
Not for the first time Jo thought that Marian Finucane should be canonised. How did she keep her temper with some of her listeners, dig something interesting out of what they were rambling on and on about on her radio program? Did she never want to tell them to shut the hell up, tear off her headphones and start running out of that studio until someone stopped her?
That’s what Jo would have done with that woman and her extended families. What kind of a world did she live in, for God’s sake? The country was coming down with
extended families. Children nowadays had two sets of homes to go to and four sets of grandparents. That was in any ordinary sort of home where the parents had separated and made other arrangements. How much more extended could a family get?
Take her own case. Jo poured herself another cup of tea, and marvelled at how Marian had manoeuvred the woman into a less fractious frame of mind.
There were three children—fifteen, fourteen and ten—and they had Jo as their mother, and they had Sean as their father. But Sean was married to . . . well, sort of married to Nancy, and they had two children who were three and two. And Jo herself had a friend, Kevin, who was very, very kind and good, and not even a sort-of husband because he didn’t live there at all, he just came to visit. And Kevin had one son who was twenty and lived with his mother, and Kevin lived in a bedsitter by himself, and painted pictures of people’s houses and then went and offered them to the house owners for sale.
Jo thought that was extended enough for the old bat on the radio. Her children had a whole rake of people who wanted them on Christmas Day. Sean their father wanted them: he had said several times that Jo had them last year and now it was his turn. And Nancy said she wanted them because she wanted to please Sean and secretly she hoped they might help her mind the babies. And Jo’s mother, who was a widow, wanted them in her house because they were her grandchildren and she loved them, and her other grandchildren were in Brussels. Sean’s mother and father wanted them because they were their grandchildren, and also they had this huge big house which was simply crying out for children at Christmas. And Nancy’s mother had wanted everyone to come to her for Christmas because she was going to have a hip operation in the New Year and she needed company, even if it was the family of this man that her beautiful daughter Nancy had taken up with and whose two children she had given birth to, as bold as brass.
Kevin wanted to be with them playing games, taking them out to fly a kite the way no one else could. He asked if he could have them for a few hours on Christmas morning. But it wouldn’t be suitable, of course, if they were at their father’s. It wouldn’t be right somehow, if their mother’s fancy man came and borrowed them for an outing.
And Jo herself wanted them with a terrible ache to make sense of the whole damn thing, like how on earth she had allowed Sean to walk out of her life and into Nancy’s. ‘Bring back the nuclear family,’ Jo thought, where there was one mummy, one daddy and children, and that was the little cell.
And yet she really didn’t believe that. She and Sean had been having too many rows, thought differently about far too many things. They were not the same people that they had been when they met and fell in love and married twenty years ago.
It would have been idiotic to remain tied to each other, pretending that nothing had changed. She was far easier with a slow, gentle man like Kevin, not a go-getter like Sean. Sean, on the other hand, needed the enthusiasm and ready co-operation of a Nancy in his business deals and his networking; and for most of the time it worked fine. The children had adjusted remarkably well: they knew they were welcome in both homes. The boys would sometimes laugh at Nancy’s nonsense, and tell Jo things they knew would please her, like Nancy having rules that you had to take off your shoes on the new carpet, and you had to wash all the dishes properly before you put them in the dishwasher.
But Janie, her ten-year old, never told funny stories after her visits to her father. She just looked a little thoughtful, maybe even wistful, and Jo never questioned her about it. If there was anything to say, Janie would say it in her own good time.
She said it just before Christmas. ‘Why can’t we all be together? You know, everyone, all the grannies and grandpa and Kevin and Nancy and the babies too. And you and Dad at the centre of it?’
Jo thought she had done quite a good job explaining why it wouldn’t work. Everyone liked to build up their own tradition. The main thing that Janie must realise was that everyone loved her, and she was wanted and needed everywhere.
‘Oh, I know that,’ Janie said airily. ‘It’s just that it would be warmer if we were all together. There would be no gaps; no one missing.’
Jo was always great at advising other people what to do. She told Kevin he should put little cheap frames on his drawings of houses so that they would look more finished. She told her friend Maureen to cut her ridiculous long hair, and how to wear a blusher so that it didn’t look as if she had two red consumptive spots on her face. She told her next-door neighbour to tie the lid of her dustbin to the handle and then she wouldn’t have to run after it every bin-day. Why couldn’t she tell herself what to do in the face of a child’s longing?
There had to be a simple solution.
And then she heard her voice saying to Janie: ‘You know, you’re quite right, there are gaps. Why don’t we have a huge big party for everyone here on the Saturday after Christmas. Let’s ask everyone to lunch; will we write the invitations now?’
With every envelope Jo wrote she began to wonder was she entirely mad. Inviting Nancy to the home from which she had extricated Sean. Inviting Nancy’s daft mother, who went on as if she were the only person in Western civilisation to face a hip operation. Asking her own mother, who had always said if she were to find herself within fifty metres of that no-good Sean she would not answer for her actions. Open the door to Sean’s parents, who were so grand, and had never hidden the fact that Sean had married so far beneath him he could not be blamed for having taken up with someone else.
And Kevin? Dear, kind Kevin who never wanted any trouble, how could he be placed in the middle of all this? And would it be appropriate or insane to ask his frail wife and his discontented son as well?
Janie however, being ten, had no reservations about any of it. She told her brothers the good news. ‘We have to face the fact that our mother may be barking,’ said the elder boy. ‘Fasten your seatbelts,’ said the younger.
On Christmas Day Jo delivered the children to their father’s house, and waved cheerily from her battered little car. ‘Don’t forget Saturday,’ she cried, and roared off before she could see Nancy trying to come up with an excuse. Then she took her mother to Christmas lunch in a hotel where they both got extremely drunk and led all the singing that the hotel had not actually known was going to be part of its Christmas program.
Then there was St Stephen’s Day to get over the hangover, and groan through tales of how Nancy had put plastic mats over the good ones, and how she lost her temper with Daddy when he poured hock into the claret glasses.
And then there was Friday, when the horror of what she had done began to seep in, and then it was Saturday. ‘Do you want any help with this . . . er . . . thing?’ her boys asked, but she waved them off, with Kevin up in the hills in the fresh air, while she and Janie went to the supermarket.
Jo had hoped that she might be inspired but she wasn’t. The whole thing was ludicrous. It was ten o’clock in the morning. In three hours people were going to converge on her house, about ten guests and her own family. She would have to feed fourteen people, most of whom were related to each other in the most complex of ways—based on infidelity, if you came to think of it. Or adultery as her mother would undoubtedly have put it had she been asked. Which she wouldn’t be. Nor had she been kept fully in the picture about Kevin and his presence in the scheme of things. ‘Oh, Janie,’ Jo said piteously to her ten-year-old daughter. ‘Janie, tell me what are we going to give them to eat?’
‘I don’t suppose they’ll mind,’ Janie said briskly. ‘They mightn’t even notice; I mean, they’ll all be so glad to be together and everything, that they’ll eat anything.’ The child’s face was so enthusiastic, Jo felt like getting into her own shopping trolley, curling up and weeping her heart out.
Instead she asked: ‘What would you like to eat, Janie?’
And Janie said that everybody always liked sausages and beans and baked potatoes, with ice-cream afterwards, but that Kevin’s son was vegetarian, so they had better get a couple of green peppers to bake as w
ell.
‘But Kevin’s son isn’t coming, surely?’ Jo felt faint.
‘Of course he is, and he’s bringing elderflower mead, which he makes himself.’ Janie knew everything.
They pulled back all the furniture to make room for the guests. Like animals coming into an ark, slightly suspicious but with a gleam of optimism, they arrived, every single one of them. Nancy’s complaining mother making heavy weather of her walking stick, Sean’s lofty parents dressed as if for Ascot. Her own mother—eyes like slits—had actually met Sean at the gate and was showing a reasonable amount of interest in one of his babies. A small, beady-eyed woman, who must be Kevin’s wife, had brought a chocolate cake. Jo saw her own sons talking animatedly, with altogether too much interest, to a gangling twenty-year-old who was explaining the fermenting process of mead and how to make the alcohol content stronger.
They all said that sausages and beans were exactly what they wanted, and they had a slice of Kevin’s wife’s chocolate cake with the ice-cream. There was a steady hum of conversation, which became a steady roar after the elderflower mead, which had come in two gigantic flagons the size of the gas canisters you’d put into a heater.
There was plenty of time to talk to everyone, no grandmother felt that she had been outranked or ignored. All that pre-Christmas tension had died down, there was no stress—the big day itself was over.
It had been for most of them an inadequate day, and yet they could never have compromised and had this kind of general feast just for the sake of the children. That way nobody would have won but everybody would have lost.
