Corwin took a single five-dollar bill from his pocket and put it on the counter. He started the shot glass toward his mouth. But as he did so, he noticed two little faces staring at him through the frosted glass of the front door. Big eyes looked at him in rapt attention and breath-catching worship—the eyes of every kid who, with the purest faith, had known that there was a North Pole, that reindeer did land on rooftops, and that miracles did come down chimneys. Even kids like this had this faith on grimy one-hundred-and-eighteenth street, where Puerto Ricans crowded into cold dirty rooms to gradually realize that poverty wore the same clothes both on lush islands and in concrete canyons a thousand miles away.
Corwin had to stare back at the little faces, and then he had to smile. They looked like slightly soiled cherubs on some creased and aged Christmas card. They were excited that the man in the red suit was looking at them.
Corwin turned his back to them, and quickly gulped the contents of the shot glass. He waited a moment, then looked at the door again. The two little noses pressed against the glass suddenly disappeared. But before they went they waved to Santa Claus at the bar and Corwin waved back.
He looked thoughtfully at the empty shot glass.
“Why do you suppose there isn’t really a Santa Claus?” he asked, speaking partly to the glass, partly to the bartender.
The bartender looked up tiredly from drying glasses. “How’s that?” he asked.
“Why isn’t there a real Santa Claus”—Corwin nodded toward the front door—“for kids like that?”
The bartender shrugged. “What the hell am I, Corwin—a philosopher?” He stared at Corwin for a long moment. “Do you know what your trouble is?” he said. “Yuh let that dopey red suit go to your head!”
He picked up the five-dollar bill, rang up the cash register, then put the change in front of Corwin.
Corwin looked at the coins and smiled a little crookedly. “Flip yuh—double or nothing.”
“What the hell do yuh think this is, Corwin—Monte Carlo? Go on—get outta here!”
Corwin rose somewhat unsteadily, testing soggy legs. Then, satisfied that they were serviceable, he walked across the room to the front door and out into the cold, snowy night, buttoning the top button of his thin cotton jacket, squeezing his cap down as far as it would go. He put his head into an icy wind and started across the street.
A big Caddie, with a Christmas tree protruding from the trunk, shot past him, honking. A red-faced, angry chauffeur shouted something as the car sped away. Corwin just smiled and went on, feeling the wet flakes cool on his hot face. He stumbled on the opposite curb and reached for the lamppost which was several feet away.
His arms encircled nothing but snowflakes and he pitched forward on his face, landing on a pile of snow next to a garbage can. With great difficulty he got to a sitting position, and became suddenly aware of four ragged little legs standing close by. He looked up to see the two scrawny Puerto Rican kids staring down at him, their little faces dark against the snow.
“Santa Claus,” the little girl said, catching her breath, “I want a dolly and a playhouse.”
The silent little boy alongside nudged her with an elbow.
“And a gun,” she continued hurriedly, “and a set of soldiers and a fort and a bicycle—”
Corwin looked up into their faces. Even their excitement, their exuberance, the universal Christmas look of all children, couldn’t hide the thinness of their faces—nor could the sweetness of them, and the gentleness, hide the fact that their coats were too small for them and not nearly heavy enough for the weather.
Then Henry Corwin began to cry. Alcohol had unlocked all the gates to his reserve—what flooded out of him were the frustrations, the miseries, the failures of twenty years; the pain of the yearly Santa Claus stints in moth-eaten costumes, giving away fantasies that he didn’t own, imitating that which was only make-believe to begin with.
Henry Corwin reached out and pulled the children to him, burying his face first against one and then the other, the tears cascading down his cheeks, impossible to stop.
The two little children stared at him—incredulous that this red-coated god, who dealt in toys and unbelievable wonders, could sit on a snowy curb and cry just as they did.
“Por que Santa Claus esta llorando?” the girl whispered to the little boy. He answered her in English. “I don’t know why he’s crying. Maybe we have hurt his feelings.”
They watched him for a while until his sobs subsided and he released them, stumbling to his feet and heading down the street away from them—this thin shabby man with the wet face, looking as if he believed that all the anguish of the world was of his doing.
* * *
An hour later when Mr. Dundee saw Corwin come in through the side door, he felt that perverse pleasure that is one of the parts built into mean men. Here was someone he could vent his wrath on—a wrath that at this moment was anointed with inflammable oil. He waited for Corwin to walk toward him, drumming his fingertips together behind his back and then deftly grabbing the Santa Claus by the arm as he walked past.
“Corwin,” Dundee said through clenched teeth, ‘you’re almost two hours late! Now get over there and see if you can keep from disillusioning a lot of kids that not only there isn’t a Santa Claus—but that the one in the store happens to be a bar-hopping clod who’d be more at home playing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!” He gave Corwin a shove. “Now get with it—Santa Claus!” This last was spat out like an epithet.
Henry Corwin smiled wanly and started toward the Santa Claus section. He paused by the electric trains and watched two little colored boys staring at them as if they were a collection of miracles. Henry winked at them, went to the control panel, and started to push buttons.
Three trains started up simultaneously, racing around the tracks, over bridges, through tunnels, past station platforms. Little men came out and waved lanterns or threw mail sacks, or did anyone of a dozen marvelous things that toy trainmen do. But after a moment it seemed evident that Henry Corwin was not mechanically minded. The two little boys looked at each other with growing concern as a Union Pacific Flyer raced down the tracks on a collision course with a Civil War supply train.
Henry Corwin hastily pushed a few more buttons, but the collision was inevitable. The two trains met head-on in a welter of dented metal, ripped tracks, and flying toy trainmen.
Never one to leave well enough alone, Corwin pushed two more buttons which made the damage total. He switched another set of tracks that sent the heavily laden freight train piling into the wreckage of the first two. Toy trains flew through the air, bridges collapsed; and when the noise had subsided, Corwin saw the two little boys staring at him.
“What do yuh think?” Corwin asked them, smiling a little sheepishly.
The first little boy looked at his companion, then back toward Corwin. “How are yuh on erector sets?”. he asked.
Corwin shook his head a little sadly. “About the same.” He tousled the two little heads, and then climbed over the velvet rope that was strung around the Santa Claus chair.
There was a line of waiting children and clock-watching mothers and they surged forward when the slightly moth-eaten Kris Kringle mounted his throne. He sat there for a moment, shutting his eyes briefly as he felt the room start to spin around him. Christmas decorations and colored lights whirled round and round as if he were riding a merry-go-round. He tried to focus on the faces of the children as they kept streaming past him; tried to smile and wave at them. He shut his eyes again, feeling nausea rising inside of him. This time, when he opened them he was face to face with the blurred image of a small gargoyle being pushed toward him by a bosomy, loud woman with a set of shoulders like Tony Galento’s.
“Go ahead, Willie,” the woman’s voice screeched, “climb up on his lap. He won’t hurt you, will you, Santa Claus? You go ahead, Willie, you tell him—” She gave the seven-year-old another insistent push toward Santa Claus. Corwin half rose, weaving unsteadily
and extending a wavering hand.
“What’s your name, little boy?” Corwin asked, and then hiccoughed loudly. He tilted sideways, grabbed for the arm of the chair, and then pitched forward to land on the floor at the little boy’s feet. He sat there smiling a little wanly, unable to get up or to do anything else.
The small gargoyle took one look at Corwin and in a blaring voice, similar in pitch to his mother’s, shrieked, “Hey, mah! Santa Claus is loaded!”
The gargoyle’s mother immediately screamed, “You’ve got some nerve! You ought to be ashamed!”
Corwin just sat there and shook his head back and forth. “Madam,” he said very quietly, “I am ashamed.”
“Come on, Willie.” She grabbed the boy by the arm. “I hope this isn’t going to be a traumatic experience for you.” She looked over her shoulder toward Corwin. “Sot!”
People, hearing the tone, stopped and stared.
Mr. Dundee hurried up the aisle toward Toyland. He gave an all-pervading glance, and then his voice assumed that unctuous, placating quality of every hard-pressed floor manager.
“Is there some trouble here, madam?”
“Trouble!” the big woman spat back. “No, there’s no trouble, except this is the last time I trade in this store. You hire your Santa Clauses out of the gutter!”
She pointed toward Corwin, who was struggling to his feet. He took a hesitant step toward one of the brass poles flanking the entrance to his “throne.”
“Madam,” he said very gently, ‘‘please. It’s Christmas,”
Willie’s mother’s face twisted, and in the light of an illuminated sign which read, “Peace on Earth—Good Will to Men,” she looked like a cross between the Wicked Witch of the North and a female Ebenezer Scrooge.
“Don’t rub it in,” she said tersely. “Come on, Willie.”
She barged into two people, pushed them bodily out of the way, and dragged the child down the aisle.
Dundee turned to stare toward Corwin, then at the salespeople and customers who had congregated. “All right!” he said grimly. “Back to work! Back to your positions.”
He walked toward Corwin, stopping by the velvet rope. His thin lips twitched as he waggled a finger at Corwin and waited for him to come over to him.
“Yes, Mr. Dundee?”
“Simply this,” Dundee said, “Mr. Kris Kringle of the lower depths. Since we are only one hour and thirteen minutes away from closing, it is my distinct pleasure to inform you that there is no more need for your services. In other words, you’ve had it. Now get out of here!”
He turned to face the row of mothers and children, smiling beatifically. “All right, kiddies,” he gushed, “free lollipops! Just go over there to the candy counter. Go right ahead!”
He smiled, winked, and looked benevolent as the disappointed children and the hard-pressed mothers moved away from the Santa Claus with the sagging shoulders.
Corwin stared down at the floor, feeling the looks of the children, and after a moment turned and started to walk toward the employees’ locker.
“A word of advice,” Dundee said to him as he passed. “You’d best get that beat-up red suit back to whatever place you rented it from, before you really tie one on and ruin it for good and all.”
Corwin stopped and stared into the twitching angry little face. “Thank you ever so much, Mr. Dundee,” he said quietly. “As to my drinking—that is indefensible and you have my abject apologies. I find of late that I have very little choice in the matter of expressing emotions. I can either drink...or I can weep. And drinking is so much more subtle.”
He paused and looked briefly at the empty Santa Claus chair. “But as for my insubordination”—he shook his head—“I was not rude to that fat woman. I was merely trying to remind her that Christmas isn’t just barging up and down department store aisles and pushing people out of the way and screaming ‘foul’ because she has to open up a purse. I was only trying to tell her that Christmas is something quite different from that. It’s richer and finer and truer and...and it should allow for patience and love and charity and compassion.” He looked into the frozen mask that was Mr. Dundee’s face. “That’s all I would’ve told her,” he added gently, “had she given me the chance.”
“How philosophical!” Mr. Dundee retorted icily. “And as your parting word—perhaps you can tell us how we go about living up to these wondrous Yule standards which you have so graciously and unselfishly laid down for us?”
There was no smile on Corwin’s face. He shook his head and shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I don’t know how to tell you,” he said quietly. “I don’t know how at all. All I know is that I’m a defeated, aging, purposeless relic of another time. That I live in a dirty rooming house on a street that’s loaded with kids who think that Christmas is a day to stay out of school and nothing more. My street, Mr. Dundee, is full of shabby people where the only thing to come down the chimney on Christmas Eve is more poverty.” He smiled crookedly and looked down at his baggy red jacket. “That’s another reason I drink. So that when I walk past the tenements I’ll think that they’re the North Pole and the children are elves, and that I’m really Santa Claus carrying a bag of wondrous things for all of them.”
He fingered the worn cotton “fur’ around his neck. “I wish, Mr. Dundee,” he said as he started to turn away, “I wish that on just one Christmas...only one...I could see some of the have nots, the shabby ones, the hopeless and the dreamless ones...just on one Christmas...I’d like to see the meek inherit the earth.”
The crooked smile came again as he looked down at his bony hands and then up at Mr. Dundee. “That’s why I drink, Mr. Dundee, and that’s why I weep.”
He took a deep breath, the strangely twisted little smile still on his face, then turned and shuffled down the aisle past the whispering salesgirls and the tired shoppers, who looked at this symbol of Christmas who was so much more tired than they.
* * *
Henry Corwin walked down the avenue past l04th Street. He felt the cold snow on his face and looked vaguely at the festive windows of the stores as he passed. When he reached his block he headed toward the saloon, walking very slowly, hands buried in his armpits. He turned a corner and headed down an alley toward the rear door of the bar, and it was then that he heard the sound.
It was a strange sound. Sleigh bells—or something like them. But very odd. Somehow muffled and indistinct. He stopped and looked skyward. Then he smiled to himself and shook his head, assuring himself that sleigh bells or anything else could be found only in his mind—that tired, whiskey-dulled brain. But after a moment he heard the bells again, this time more persistent and louder.
Corwin had stopped near a loading platform of a wholesale meat plant. He looked up at the sky again and wondered. He started at the caterwauling dissonance of a night-prowling cat that suddenly leaped out from behind a barrel and scurried past him in the snow. It raced across the alley to another loading platform on the other side, leaping to the top of a garbage can and in the process knocking over a burlap bag that rested precariously on top of it. Then the cat disappeared in the darkness.
The burlap bag landed at Corwin’s feet and spilled open, depositing half a dozen dented tin cans in the snow. Corwin reached down and righted the bag, shoving the cans back inside. Then he lifted the burlap bag over his shoulder and started to carry it back to the platform. Halfway there he heard the bells again. This time much clearer and very much nearer.
Again he stopped in his tracks and stared up toward the sky, wide-eyed. Another sound joined that of the bells. Corwin couldn’t describe it except to make a mental note that it was like the sound of tiny hoofbeats. He very slowly let the burlap bag drop from his shoulders, and once again it fell over and spilled its contents on the ground. Corwin looked down at it, blinked his eyes, rubbed them, and stared.
Protruding from the open bag was the front end of a toy truck, an arm and a leg of a doll, and evidence of other toys of every description. He fell to his
knees and started to reach into the bag, taking out truck, doll, playhouse, a box marked “Electric Train,” and then stopped, realizing that the bag must be filled with all such things. He let out a cry of surprise and jammed the toys back in the bag. He hoisted it to his shoulder and started a slow, stumbling trot toward the street, occasionally stopping to pick up a toy that fell, but feeling the words bubbling up inside him and finally coming out.
“Hey,” he shouted as he turned the corner onto 111th Street. “Hey, everybody! Hey, kids—Merry Christmas!”
* * *
The 104th Street Mission was a big, ugly, barren place, sullen to the eye and deadening to the spirit. Its main room was a naked square full of straight-backed, uncomfortable benches, with a small platform and organ at the far end. Large signs dotted the walls with little homilies like, “Love Thy Neighbor,” “Do unto Others as You Would Have Others Do unto You,” “Faith, Hope and Charity.”
Seated up and down the rows of benches were perhaps fifteen shabby old men. A few of them held cheap china mugs filled with watery coffee. They cradled them in cold hands, feeling the warmth and letting the steam rise up into their bearded tired faces. They wore the faces of poverty and age, each encrusted with layer after layer of the hopelessness of lonely old men whose lives had somehow swiftly and silently disintegrated into false teeth, and cheap coffee mugs, and this ugly, drafty room that traded religion and thin gruel in exchange for the last remaining fragments of dignity.
Sister Florence Harvey headed the Mission. After twenty-four years, she had begun to blend with the walls, the benches, and the miserable atmosphere. She was a tall, sour-looking spinster with deep lines imbedded at the comer of her mouth. She pounded the organ with a kind of desperate verve, playing badly but loudly an obscure Christmas carol that had spirit if not melody.
An old man rushed in from the outside and began whispering to another old man who sat on the rear bench. After a moment all the old men were whispering and pointing toward the door. Sister Florence noted the disturbance and tried to drown it out by playing even louder, but by this time some of the men were on their feet, talking loudly and gesturing. Sister Florence finally struck a discordant chord on the organ, rose, and glared at the old men in front of her.
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 120
