by Anne Tyler
“It was McKinley who was responsible for us taking over Cuba,” J.J. went on. “Also Hawaii, if I’m not very much mistaken.”
Poppy lowered the portrait and turned to frown at J.J. “Who did you say you were?” he asked.
“J.J. is our electrician, Poppy,” Rebecca said. “He just this week fixed our thermostat.”
J.J. was nodding emphatically, as if urging Poppy to do the same, but Poppy kept his frown. Then suddenly his forehead cleared. “’All I Want for Christmas Is You,’” he said.
“What, Poppy?” Rebecca asked.
“That’s what they were playing on the radio his boy brought along. ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’”
“Whoa! Sorry if we disturbed you,” J.J. said.
“Oh, it’s better than some others I’ve heard.”
He held the portrait out to Rebecca, and she stepped forward to take it from him.
“So! Mr. Davitch!” Aunt Ida said. “Did you receive a birthday greeting from the President?”
Poppy sent another frown in the direction of the portrait, which Rebecca was propping now on the chest of drawers. Perhaps he thought McKinley was the President in question. Instead of answering, though, he said, “Mr., ah, J.J., I wonder if you could settle a little argument for me.”
“Be glad to if I can,” J.J. told him.
“Those instant-on kind of lights. What do you call them? You know the kind. The ones that light up without blinking first.”
“Incandescent,” J.J. said.
“Now, I maintain that folks should turn those off whenever they leave a room. Because switching them back on doesn’t require any particular burst of energy, does it? As opposed to a fluorescent. But Beck, here: oh, no, she has to leave a trail of lights lit anyplace she goes. A waste of money, I tell her.”
“Yes, sir, you’d be amazed,” J.J. said. “Why, a single hundred-watt bulb, left burning for an hour—”
“J.J.! Don’t encourage him!” Rebecca said. “Poppy’d have us sitting in the dark, if he could have his way. Even the tree lights upset him! If we were to leave this room right now, just to go to the dining room and get ourselves a bite, he would turn off the tree lights first!”
“Oh,” J.J. said. He looked unhappy. No doubt he felt he’d been put on the spot. “Well: tree lights. I mean, these dinky white things are not a major draw of power. And you have to figure the, like, decorative effect. They’re more of a decoration, for people to see from outside too and not just inside the house.”
“See there?” Rebecca asked Poppy. “Didn’t I tell you? Oh, lights have a tremendous effect!” she said, turning to the others. “Like when guests are walking up the front walk for a party: it makes such a difference in their mood if they see all the windows glowing. They get . . . anticipatory. Switch on every light you own, I always say. Let them blaze for all they’re worth! Let them set the house on fire!”
J.J. laughed, and his son grinned shyly. Aunt Ida said, “Yes, you would certainly want to give people a nice sense of welcome.” Poppy, though, only grunted, and Rebecca’s mother shrank back slightly in her seat.
“Well, anyhow,” Rebecca said after a moment. “Drinks, anyone?” And she was careful to keep her voice at a decorous pitch.
* * *
It was so predictable that non-Davitches would show up before Davitches. Precisely fifteen minutes past the designated hour—Baltimore’s idea of the proper arrival time—Alice Farmer rang the doorbell in a silver sharkskin suit and silver shoes and a black felt cartwheel hat, bearing a stunningly wrapped gift that turned out to be a prayer toaster. (A prayer on a bread-slice-shaped piece of cardboard popped out of the slot if you pressed the lever, one prayer for every day of the year.) The physical therapist, Miss Nancy, followed with a flock of Mylar balloons so numerous that they had to be nudged through the door in clusters. Next came Poppy’s two friends, Mr. Ames and Mr. Hardesty. Mr. Ames brought a cactus with a bulbous pink growth on top that Poppy said reminded him of a baboon’s behind. Mr. Hardesty brought nothing, which was understandable because he was in a walker for which he needed both hands, besides having to rely on a sullen niece for his shopping; so Poppy was gracious about it.
At a quarter till three the first Davitch arrived: Zeb, short of breath. “Sorry,” he told Rebecca. “There was an emergency call from the hospital, and I went off thinking I’d come straight here afterwards, but I forgot about the gift; so I had to go back home first and get it.”
He meant the gift that he and she were giving jointly: a framed reprint of Poppy and Aunt Joyce’s engagement photo. He had bundled it clumsily in wads of white tissue and masses of Scotch tape. “I wish you could have seen it before I wrapped it,” he told her. “They did a tremendous job with the restoration.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Rebecca said. She had been dubious when she first slipped it, stealthily, from the family album. Blooms of mold had destroyed most of the background, and a white fold line ran across one corner.
Poppy was getting rowdy, like an overstimulated child. “Well? What have we here?” he asked as Zeb entered the room. “Bring it on in! Let me at it!”
“Happy birthday,” Zeb told him, and he laid the package across Poppy’s knees. “This is from Rebecca and me.”
“Well, thank you. Not much sense in saving this wrap, I don’t believe.” He ripped the tissue off one end and tugged the picture free. “Oh, my,” he said.
Zeb was right: the restorers had worked a miracle. The background was unblemished now, and the couple seemed somehow more alive. Aunt Joyce, slimmer than Rebecca had ever seen her, wore one of those drapey 1930s dresses that appeared to have been snatched up at the midriff and given a violent twist. Poppy was startlingly black-haired and black-mustached, and he gazed out at the viewer while Joyce had eyes only for him.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Poppy asked Rebecca. She thought he meant the restoration, until he went on. “There I am, watching the camera when I could have been looking at Joyce. I thought I had the rest of my life to look at Joyce, was why. I was thirty-nine years old. She was twenty-two. I thought she would outlive me.”
“Oh, if that is not the truth!” Aunt Ida cried from the couch.
Rebecca’s mother said, “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Davitch, but wasn’t I once told that your wife had always had a weak heart?”
“Weak hearts ran in her family,” Poppy said. “But I never really believed that she would go first.”
“Well, anyways, she sure was pretty,” Alice Farmer said. She had crossed the room to peer over Poppy’s shoulder. “How’d a plain old guy like you come to catch such a pretty young thing?”
“She used to work behind the pastry counter at her mother’s breakfast place,” Poppy said. “Finally her mother switched her to dishing out bacon and eggs, just so I’d eat more nutritiously.”
“Very considerate of her,” Miss Nancy said heartily, and J.J. chuckled, but Poppy just stared at the photo as if he hadn’t heard.
Then the door slammed against the closet, and he straightened and said, “Ah, well.”
First came NoNo with a sweater she’d been laboring over for months—a bulky white fisherman’s knit, not really Poppy’s style. He was nice about it, though. “You made this?” he asked her. “You hate to knit! You swore you’d give it up after you finished those baby booties.”
“Well, this time I will give it up, I promise,” NoNo said, and she bent to kiss his cheek.
Peter shook Poppy’s hand and said, “I’m supposed to tell you happy birthday, and that me and the other kids are going in on one big present from the bunch of us.”
“Well, that’s all right, then,” Poppy decided.
Peter was wearing his school blazer, the sleeves a good inch shorter than the last time Rebecca had seen him in it. It matched J.J.J.’s, she realized. They must go to the same school, for they seemed to know each other. J.J.J. made room for him on the couch, and they put their heads together over some kind of gadget that Peter pulled from his pock
et. “I think the way I can get it to work is by differential friction,” Rebecca heard him say.
Biddy arrived with still more pastry boxes—having brought most of the food earlier that morning—and headed for the kitchen, followed by Dixon, who first set a wooden keg just inside the front door. Troy, however, came straight into the parlor to hand Poppy a small, flat package. “Your old friend Haydn,” he explained. “Biddy’s gift is the food, but I wanted you to have something especially from me.”
Poppy hadn’t always seen eye to eye with Troy (he had suggested more than once that a timely stint in the Army would have set him straight), but he seemed pleased when he unwrapped the CD. “Oh, one of my favorites,” he said. “The Military Symphony!”
Rebecca shot Troy a suspicious look, but he just smiled at her. “Why don’t I put it on,” he said, and he took the CD from Poppy and went over to the stereo.
Then Patch and her family arrived, and then Min Foo and hers. For several minutes, the foyer was wall-to-wall people. Children were struggling out of jackets; Abdul was cooing in his infant seat; Patch was having a tantrum over something insulting Min Foo had just said. (How had Min Foo had time, even?) “Come wish Poppy a happy birthday,” Rebecca told them. “Emmy! Are you wearing heels? Hakim, let me take the baby while you . . . Patch, please, come on in and tell Poppy happy birthday. I’m sure Min Foo didn’t mean whatever it was.”
“Min Fool, is more like it,” Patch snapped, but she trailed the others into the parlor, where Biddy had started circulating a platter of petits fours and Dixon was passing macaroons.
The party had changed to the stand-up kind, now that there was a crowd. Only the older ones stayed seated—Poppy receiving greetings benignly from his wing chair. Mr. Ames was telling Aunt Ida that he was choosing Poppy’s birth date for his next lottery number. Mr. Hardesty was asking the room at large who on earth all these people were.
Patch handed Poppy a gift so heavy he almost dropped it. And no wonder: he unwrapped it to find ankle weights, shaped like big blue doughnuts. “For your daily walk,” Patch explained. “They’ve just completed a study that proves . . .”
Then Dixon hauled in the keg, which turned out to contain the children’s present—a giant collection of horehound drops, Jujubes, Allsorts, Good & Plentys, and other candies, some of which Rebecca had assumed to be obsolete. Dixon pried off the lid and held up various samples while Poppy made appreciative remarks. “You helped buy me this? And you?” he asked various youngsters, skillfully avoiding the use of any names. “Oh, my, sassafras balls. How did you know I love sassafras?” In fact, his enthusiasm was probably genuine; this may have been the most successful gift yet.
Hakim’s videotape, on the other hand, bewildered him. He unwrapped it and peered at it doubtfully. “Paul P. Davitch,” he read out, “1954–1967. What? I don’t understand.”
“Those are the years covered by the videotape,” Rebecca told him. “Hakim took all our home movies to a shop where they turn reels into tapes. Remember Uncle Buddy’s home movies?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed,” Poppy said.
Uncle Buddy was Mother Davitch’s brother, the one technically minded member of the family, and when he died, in 1968, the movie camera might as well have been buried with him. Nobody had been certain how to work the projector, either; so this tape caused considerable interest. Children were called together and arranged on the floor, and chairs were dragged in from the dining room, and Mr. Hardesty’s walker was placed to one side. Zeb, Dixon, and Troy—the three tallest—retreated to the back of the group. Then Rebecca started the VCR.
First there were the usual hurdles—a black-and-white snowstorm, a duel between the two remote controls until the snowstorm disappeared, a pause while a child was sent off to silence Haydn. Eventually a white calling card came into focus with Paul P. Davitch, 1954–1967 engraved in flowing script. The next card read Photography: William R. “Buddy” Brand, and the next, Produced by Big Bob’s Production Service—all of these accompanied by a piano playing “Stardust.” October or November, 1954, the last card read.
Whatever scientific advances had restored Poppy’s engagement photo were evidently not available to Big Bob, because the people who filled the screen were bleached nearly white and shot through with darting white lines like slants of rain. Poppy stood on a brownish lawn with a plumper, dowdier Aunt Joyce, her knees like two underbaked biscuits below the cuffs of her long Bermudas. In front of them, hunched over the handlebar of a tricycle, was a small black-haired boy who would have to be Zeb. All three of them had their faces screwed up against the sunlight. “Would you look?” Poppy murmured, but he was the only one who seemed affected by this oddly unmovie-like shot. The younger children stirred restlessly, and a woman—perhaps Miss Nancy—was heard to ask, “Was there ever a less attractive fashion era than the fifties?”
A new card flashed on the screen: Christmas 1956. By now Uncle Buddy must have grasped the capabilities of his medium, for the scene was almost too animated. An electric train whizzed soundlessly around the base of a Christmas tree before it was obliterated by somebody’s swirling plaid skirt. An out-of-focus child (Zeb again, suddenly taller) lunged gleefully toward the camera with a red metal dump truck in one hand. Then Joe (Joe! so young and graceless that Rebecca almost didn’t know him, with his hair too short and his neck too thin) plucked Zeb up and removed him, and Mother Davitch advanced displaying a velvet-boxed bottle of perfume as if she were in a commercial, smiling a determined smile that was almost scary. She was followed, as if in a conga line, by Aunt Joyce vampishly modeling a pink angora sweater with a tag dangling from the top button, and then by Poppy holding a cellophane-wrapped bow tie in front of the bow tie he was already wearing. Last, a hairy arm was tugged into view by someone else’s hand, and a shirtfront loomed up, and then a man’s widely laughing, protesting mouth. “Uncle Buddy himself, in his one and only film appearance,” Zeb had time to announce before the whole scene vanished.
The children were asking, “Where were you, Mom?” and their mothers were saying, “Just wait a minute. I wasn’t even born yet.” Poppy was telling Mr. Ames to take his word for it: this was not really the way things had been. More Christmases swam by—Christmas 1957 and Christmas 1958. “Uncle Buddy lived in Delaware,” Zeb explained. “He didn’t get to visit more than once or twice a year.” The train beneath the tree acquired more cars; Poppy acquired more bow ties; Zeb grew another six inches. “Stardust” went on playing languorously, although Mr. Hardesty pointed out that some sort of Christmas carol might have been more in keeping. As if to prove him wrong, the next card read Spring 1961, and when it was removed, Joe and a glamorous, cross-looking Tina were standing on the front stoop with a cylinder of pastel blankets. “That’s me!” Biddy told the children, although she would have known that only because of the date. The clearest part of the picture was an arching bough of pink blossoms extending from the side of the screen where the front-parlor window would have been, and for some reason, this evidence of a long-dead, long-forgotten tree that Rebecca herself had never laid eyes on made her sadder than anything else. Poppy, too, gave a sigh. “Ah, me,” he said, and he gently stroked his mustache.
Christmas 1962, Christmas 1964. Easter 1965 and Christmas 1965 and Easter 1966. Biddy pushed a doll buggy and Patch learned to roller-skate and NoNo shook the bars of her playpen. Joe turned into the man Rebecca had married. Poppy’s hair was gray but Aunt Joyce’s was a yellower blond than ever. Mother Davitch’s mouth started blurring around the edges.
Then September 1966, and who was this? A heavyset young woman standing in front of a picnic table, wearing a silly miniskirt that exposed her broad thighs. Her face was large and shiny. Rebecca felt embarrassed for her; she seemed like such an interloper, so presumptuous, beaming straight at the camera while other, more entitled people (Mother Davitch, Aunt Joyce) wrapped leftovers in waxed paper.
She slid a glance around the audience, but nobody made any comment.
Christmas 196
7, and Min Foo scowled from her father’s arms, her two clenched fists like tiny spools of thread. “There I am!” Min Foo said, hugging Lateesha on her lap.
As if Min Foo’s arrival had been the whole point of the movie, a card proclaiming The End promptly filled the screen. A few people clapped. Then another card popped up listing family members in order of appearance. Paul P. Davitch, Joyce Mays Davitch, Zebulon Davitch, M.D. . . . Rebecca went on watching, transfixed, but the children were drifting away now and the adults had started talking among themselves. Biddy called, “Folks? Are you listening? Cake will be served in the dining room.” Emmy and Joey were elbowing each other for space on the piano bench; Lateesha was chasing balloons; Poppy was telling J.J. that Joyce had been much prettier than the camera made her out to be.
The credits ended, followed by more snow. Rebecca bent to press the Rewind button, and then she went out to the dining room where a sizable group already stood admiring the mammoth birthday cake.
“My name wasn’t on the card,” she told Zeb.
Without turning, he said, “Hmm?”
“They didn’t list me on the card when they rolled the credits.”
Miss Nancy plucked Rebecca’s sleeve. “Could I just say something?” she asked. “In view of Mr. Davitch’s limitations, I’m not at all in favor of ankle weights for his walks.”
From behind them, Min Foo said, “Didn’t I tell them so? Didn’t I tell Patch? ‘The poor man can barely stagger around as it is,’ I said, ‘and now you want to tie lead weights to his ankles?’”
“I heard that!” Patch called from the other side of the room. “Criticize, criticize! Why don’t you say it to my face, if that’s how you feel?”
“I did say it to your face.”
Meanwhile, Rebecca’s mother was telling Alice Farmer how well the folks in Church Valley got along with the Colored; Haydn was resuming on the stereo; Emmy and Joey were playing “Heart and Soul” on the piano. Biddy was using the butane torch to light the candles on the cake—an actual one hundred candles, as Rebecca had insisted, plus an extra to grow on. They ringed each of the lower tiers and completely covered the top except for the center, where a little ceramic man stood—one half of a bride-and-groom set—wearing a black tailcoat and a tiny, bushy mustache very much like Poppy’s. “Aww,” several people said when they saw him. Poppy himself watched gravely, standing very straight with both hands on the crook of his cane.
