Not only was earthly life represented in my mother’s crèche scene but heaven and hell as well. Heaven was set up on the highest shelf, in an arch just below the ceiling. God reigned there, visible as a squat wooden figure painted in gold and blue, placed among all the singing angels. A full angel band played in the background. Cat angels, fat angels, and short and tall angels filled in the sides of the shelf. My mother put a figure representing Homer in one corner of heaven, and in the other corner, a glass man at a glass piano represented Mozart.
Hell took up the lowest bookshelf and spread along the floorboards. My mother started building hell only when we got a little older, but once started, hell took off. It soon became overpopulated with little red figures, including a red-sequined Mickey Mouse and tiny red devils made by Anne-Marie out of clay, their arms lifted in friendly waves and with the sweetest of smiles pricked into their chubby faces. Friends brought Day of the Dead figures from Mexico. A toy snake made its way into hell and never came out again.
I have never missed a Christmas with my parents, but Anne-Marie stayed away a few times, including the Christmas before she died. She and Marvin, along with two friends, went to India that year for three weeks of travel. The worst tsunami in history rolled through the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004. I knew Anne-Marie hadn’t planned on going down to the beaches in southern India, but when for two days we hadn’t heard from her, I began to fear the worst. What if they had changed their plans? What if they had gone to the beach and gotten caught up in one of the huge waves? When Anne-Marie finally called my parents, I felt relief, and stupidity for having worried. Twenty-one days later, back in New York, Anne-Marie felt a lump on her abdomen. We were hit with a tidal wave, but not the one I had worried about.
The Christmas after Anne-Marie died, my mother didn’t want to put up her crèche scene. Natasha and I begged her to do it.
“Do it for the boys,” we said. “Do it for us.” Finally, she agreed to display her figures in their winter wonderland. The layout had changed since my parents’ move to New York City, but it was as magnificent as ever. The santons spread in villages across the fireplace mantel, with the nativity scene to the left. New additions included a fox bringing an offering to the baby in his teeth, and a four-sided fountain for one of the village squares. Heaven reveled on a high chest to the side, and hell hunkered down in the open cavity of the nonworking fireplace. I brought my mother a figure of an angel with flowing hair resting on her stomach and reading a book. My mother placed her in heaven, beside Homer.
Jack and I had our own holiday Christmas traditions, going back to the first days of our relationship. We first kissed on New Year’s Eve, and the following year, we bought our first Christmas tree together. The tree was small and skinny enough to carry home the thirty-plus blocks from Little Italy to West Twenty-first Street. We put twisty green wire with red berries on the ends onto the branches—our first ornaments—and when Jack’s daughter, Meredith, and I baked Christmas cookies that turned out like lead, we painted them, drilled holes through the top, and hung them up too. Over the years the size of our trees went from smaller to bigger to smaller again, depending on the size of our living space.
The year Meredith moved into our two-bedroom apartment on West Eighty-first Street and began living with us full-time, we bought a very small tree. Jack and I had brought our bed into the living room to give his fourteen-year-old daughter her own bedroom, leaving three boys to share the other bedroom. There was no space for anything but a tabletop tree that year. Two years later, when we left that apartment for a town house with leaking walls, a partial roof, and no working kitchen, we bought a huge tree to reach the top of the parlor-floor ceiling.
Since we moved to the suburbs, our tree has been getting bigger and bigger. We went every year to a farm on the other side of town, with its acres and acres of white spruce, blue spruce, and Douglas fir. The fields of trees roll right alongside I-95, and this year we once again picked our tree against the roar of trucks. Maybe it was the trucks, maybe it was the cacophony of six different voices with six different opinions as to the right tree for us, maybe it was our crazy thirst for that great pine smell, but we’d long lost our ability to gauge what a tree in a field would look like when we brought it home to stand alone in our front hall.
“Are you sure?” the tree-farm volunteer asked us when we pointed out our chosen tree.
“Yes, definitely,” I said. Jack drove the car around while the volunteer hacked through the tree’s ten-inch trunk. When it was finally on top of our car, sap dripping down the back, I saw what the young guy had been talking about. The branches of the tree drooped down over both sides, blocking the windows and the back doors.
I got in the car and checked the view. “I can see clear out the front. Let’s go, boys!” The boys climbed in over the front seat, and off we went. Getting the tree off the car when we got home wasn’t easy. We pushed and pulled it down to the ground, and then dragged the tree over to the front door.
“Lift it,” Jack bellowed. “Don’t drag it. Lift! Lift!”
Four of us shoved the tree up the front steps while Jack and Michael pulled from ahead. Accompanied not by carols but by swear words we’d vowed never to use around the boys but used every single Christmas at tree-getting time, we got the tree into the hallway. I placed the crowning decoration of a blond angel on the top branch (where did we get that hideous thing?), and we positioned ourselves to haul the tree upright. More pushing and pulling and more swearing, and we got it into the two-ton iron stand. The tree tottered, scraping the surrounding walls and ceiling and leaving long marks in green and brown.
“Is it scratching anywhere?” Jack asked from his position down by the stand.
“No, no,” I answered. “Everything’s good up here.” The tree steadied and stood. Jack tightened the bolts along the trunk and moved away.
We had outdone ourselves, again. This year’s tree was so tall that its top poked into the chandelier hanging from the second-floor ceiling. A light from the chandelier went right up the angel’s skirts, illuminating her from a whole new angle. Branches of the tree spread out across the staircase and filled the front hallway, making passage up or across difficult. It was as if the tree had come first and we had arrived second, assembling ourselves, our house, and our lives around this overtall, overpowering tree. I had images of a squirrel poking its head out, just like in the movie Christmas Vacation. Where am I? the furry little creature wonders, just before he leaps onto my head.
I tracked strands of colored lights through the tree’s branches, then let my kids loose with the ornaments. By nightfall our tree—our lodestar, our reason for the season—was back in full-reign mode. It was no longer too big. It was now just right. The cats took their places under the low branches, while we all moved to sit in the living room. We could get only a partial view; the tree was so big there was no place in the house to see it fully. All views were partial, shot through with sparkling color, blazing lights, and a background of deep green.
Over the next few days I brought out the old record albums, Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Bing Crosby Christmas, and excerpts from Handel’s Messiah. I hauled down from the attic our crate of Christmas books and pawed through them, each book sparking a memory of past Christmases. We had plenty of children’s books, and my favorites were well-worn, marked with sticky fingerprints and torn corners: Peter Spier’s Christmas, drawings of one family’s yearly rituals; Christmas Without a Tree by Elizabeth B. Rodger, about a generous little pig; and The Christmas Crocodile by Bonny Becker, illustrated by David Small, and used by me as a blueprint for what I wanted my house to look like during the holidays (before the crocodile ate everything). We also had classics like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Lois Lenski’s Christmas Stories—I still have the original copy that I’d received when I was ten. And I had our family’s copy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Christmas Story, with its lovely words and beautiful paintings.
Most years I reread
all of the books dragged down from the attic, from the simplest children’s book to the Ghost Stories of Christmas collection. Not this year. I wouldn’t have time this year, not with my book-a-day schedule. I was worried that I wouldn’t have time for many of our Christmas rituals, what with my reading. But I made plans to do the things we really liked to do, and I figured the rest would get worked out as we went along.
I chose to read some new Christmas books—the terribly boring Abbot’s Ghost by Louisa May Alcott; Jimmy Carter’s endearingly boring Christmas in Plains; and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain by Charles Dickens. The man in Dickens’s story is haunted by memories of past wrongs done to him, and by past sufferings: “I see them in the fire, but now. They come back to me in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years.”
A ghost who appears to be the doppelgänger of the haunted man offers him a deal. The double offers to take away all bad memories, leaving a blank space. He promises a void where once there were shadows of the past. “Memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!” And so the haunted man makes the bargain. Out go all memories, and with them, all the man’s capacity for tenderness, empathy, understanding, and caring. Our haunted man realizes too late that by giving up memories, he has become a hollow and miserable man, and a spreader of misery to all whom he touches. Because it is Christmas and because he is Dickens’s creation, the haunted man gets a chance to renege on the bargain with the ghost, get back his memories, and spread holiday cheer.
I loved the story, convinced as I had become of the importance of memories. But I came up hard against the conclusion posited by Dickens: the reason it is good to remember a past wrong is so that “we may forgive it.” How could I ever forgive the taking of Anne-Marie’s life?
The weekend before Christmas my parents and Natasha came to Westport to make the gingerbread men we make every year, a tradition dating back to when I was in elementary school. Our gingerbread men reflect our interests. When I was little, I made snowmen iced with white frosting to a one-inch thickness. I’ve always had a sweet tooth, and I took any license to indulge. When I was a teenager, I made a David Bowie gingerbread man, using red-hot cinnamon dots for the lightning bolt across his face; Anne-Marie made a Lady Godiva; and Natasha made volleyball players wearing our high school colors. Around the same time my mother began her tradition of making an anatomically correct Adam and Eve, and a gorgeously endowed mermaid. This year my kids tended toward the gory, using red sprinkles for blood and decapitating their gingerbread men so frequently it was as if we were making an army of martyred saints.
Days passed on with reading and writing, Christmas card making and sending, carol singing, school parties, and one car accident. I was hit from behind when I stopped for a school bus. Luckily, I came out just a little stiff in the neck, and the car was drivable. Repairs would have to wait until after the holidays.
On Christmas Eve, friends came for dinner. The evening ended with dancing on the kitchen table. Peter was in charge of the music, the husbands were responsible for photos, and rest of us—two mothers and six kids—were four feet off the ground and whooping it up. Christmas morning came early, the boys eager to see what Santa brought them. While Jack drove into New York City to pick up my family for our usual celebration of eating, drinking, and eating and drinking some more, I wrote up my review of The Love of the Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald, read the day before. The review was posted by the time Jack got back with my parents, Natasha, and her boyfriend, Phillip. Christmas eating and drinking and talking and toasting and celebrating began.
It was after ten o’clock on Christmas night when I sat down with my book for the day. The kids were asleep upstairs, my father and Jack were watching a movie in the family room, and my mother and I sat in the living room, seated in a strategic position, both by the fire and with a great view of the tree. Its lights glowed in the darkness of the front hallway. I stoked up the logs in the fireplace and brought my mother a glass of port and myself a mug of hot chocolate doctored liberally with Tia Maria.
I tuned in to the crazy story of The Love Song of Monkey by Michael Graziano. A man immobilized in a coma and sunk twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea finally has the time to think about his life. As he says, “There is no place on earth better suited for meditation than the mid-ocean ridge.”
“Mama,” I said, reaching across to touch my mother on the arm. “This book, it’s about a guy who stays underwater—he can’t die, but he can’t get out of the water for years either. He just thinks all about his life. And now, that’s how it is for me.”
“Yes?” She was always willing to give me the benefit of the doubt.
“It’s like my year of reading is a similar state of suspension, and I am also plunged twenty thousand leagues under—but under a pile of books. And for me, there is no better place for meditation than with all my books. I too finally have time to think about my life.”
“And what are you thinking about?”
“That this has been a great Christmas. Because I did only what I really wanted to do—our family did the great stuff, like having you here and making the gingerbread men. I skipped making three varieties of cookies, and I read a book instead. And then I had time to read another one! And I didn’t obsess over our Christmas card. I didn’t go crazy with outdoor lights. I just hung some strands over the front porch, leaving the bushes unlit. I let the kids decorate our tree on their own, and I gave them free rein with the rest of the house.”
I pointed over to the play tables covered with white cotton and displaying mixed-up villages of nativity scenes of all shapes, sizes, and nationalities (my own collection), plastic Santas and elves, reindeer, and camels, along with wooden rabbits, birds, one dog, an assortment of miniature toy soldier nutcrackers, and an ark my father had carved for the boys, which was now covered in colored sparkles and surrounded by holly branches. It was not quite my mother’s crèche scene, but it was beautiful in its own way.
“And I have thought a lot about Anne-Marie.”
My mother’s face contracted. Then she shook her head. “I think about her all the time,” she said. “How much she would have liked to see the boys as they grow up.”
“I know.” My eyes were filling with tears, but I went on talking. “And they do remember her, too. I think they always will.”
“I hope so.”
“This reading, it makes me see how we do remember, all the time, the people we’ve loved. They become part of us—they are part of us. Anne-Marie is part of all this.”
My mother listened.
“For this one year, Mama, I am staying twenty thousand leagues below the surface of what would have been my normal, overscheduled, overcontrolled life. I have Anne-Marie to thank for this. I am underwater, swimming with the authors of all the books I’ve been reading and sucking up the oxygen of all their words, and she is there too. The lives in the books are breathing life into me, new life. And helping me learn how to keep her alive. In me.”
My mother nodded, her face tight, her eyes looking down. I knew that the way she missed Anne-Marie and longed for her to be with us was too painful for her to talk about. I felt the pain instead, in the sharpening of the air around us, in the heightening of the burn from the fireplace. There was a sudden intensity of living marked by remembering a death. And I knew, for my mother, she wished she could exchange her life for that death, and bring my sister back. But there was no such bargain to be made.
I felt a constriction deep within my throat. Neither my mother nor I would take the bargain offered by the ghost in Dickens’s story—we held on to our memories of Anne-Marie with all our might—but in our remembering of Anne-Marie, was there a place for forgiveness? Rolling forward, looking backward. Did I also have to forgive the death of my sister?
Forgiveness is an elevated form of acceptance, an acknowledgment that life is not fair: “I forgive you, life, for the shitty deal you handed my sister.” I could
n’t do that. I accepted that I was alive and that Anne-Marie was dead. I accepted that no square deal would be offered, nor could one be made. But forgiveness? Something was holding me back.
I turned off all the lights in the living room and moved to sit next to my mother on the couch. We sat together for a long time in the dark, looking at my oversize lit-up tree. Years ago I’d gone out in the dark looking for the huge star in the sky. Maybe the star I’d been looking for in the sky all those years ago was actually here. In the tree. In my family. In all these books. In all the memories I carried inside me.
Peace on Earth.
Good tidings of great joy.
It wasn’t forgiveness. But it was a beginning.
Chapter 8
Finding Another Chance
Once it perches on one’s shoulder, guilt is not easily shrugged off.
MARTIN CORRICK,
By Chance
AT THE MOMENT WHEN I STOOD BESIDE MY SISTER’S DEATHBED and heard my father crying, saw the hand of my mother clenching the white sheet covering Anne-Marie’s body, I thought only of how to take my next breath, how to go on into the next moment of being alive, when Anne-Marie no longer was. But underneath my reacting brain, deep in the recesses of matter and memory and motivation, guilt was percolating. As the days went on, I felt the weight of it, so heavy and so unwieldy. I struggled with it, turning it this way and that, trying to understand. My rational self knew that I wasn’t responsible for her death. My irrational self was not so sure. As months and then years passed, the guilt persisted. I reacted by living as fast and as hard as I could, figuring that by living double I was making it all up to Anne-Marie, living a life full of experiences that she would never have.
In the book By Chance by Martin Corrick, James Watson Bolsover is also a man burdened with guilt. Two deaths weigh upon his life, the death of his wife and the death of a child. Bolsover struggles with his remorse, fighting against it with reason and with anger, with sadness and with resignation, for “once it perches on one’s shoulder, guilt is not easily shrugged off.” His wife’s death, owing to illness, clearly was not his fault, and the child’s death was an accident. Yet he believes he might have eased the illness or prevented the accident. Without an easy resolution of either innocence or guilt, Bolsover suffers.
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Page 8
