I duck into the café, jump the queue, and beg a mug of wine to steady my nerves. I take the mug back to the sidewalk outside Fawkes and Ibis and drink it in gulps as I go on pretending I’m only window-shopping. It’s almost seven o’clock and I don’t want to miss Harry on his way out. Once I’ve drained the mug I drag myself through the heavy velvet curtain, me and my frozen sticky fingers and my yellow belly.
“So you’ve finally decided to pay me a visit, eh?” Harry says as I step into the room.
The Leuchterweibchen—may it never sell!—still dominates the room in its barbarous majesty, and the sight of it gives me heart. “I’m sorry, but I’m not actually looking to shop tonight. I was hoping you could tell me if Justin’s come back from Europe yet.”
“He hasn’t yet, no.”
“Do you think he’ll be back before the end of the year?”
“Hard to say. Mr. Fawkes’s doctors over there don’t speak very good English.” He pauses. “You’re one of the Harbingers, aren’t you?” I nod. “Will you take my advice then, Miss Harbinger? Justin may be my nephew, but he’s a real charmer, and I wouldn’t want to see one of Helena’s girls in tears over it.”
“Right,” I manage to say. “Thanks, er—Mr. Ibis.”
Harry looks at me kindly and wishes me a merry Christmas, bighearted Jew that he is.
Now that the shops are closed there aren’t many customers left at the café, and Mira is erasing the specials on the blackboard as I take the mug back to the counter. On my way up the mews I spot a mother and daughter—can’t recall their names offhand, they’re Peacocks anyway—marveling at all the goodies in the window of Hartmann’s Classic Toys: Lightning Gliders and Flexible Flyers, Raggedy Ann and Andy, deluxe editions of Scrabble and Monopoly, a gumball machine and a yellow Sesame Street record player, Holiday Barbies in frilly lamé gowns, and tin soldiers with kepi hats and red-dotted cheeks.
I pause there, just across the way from them, and watch as the mother leans in and taps gently on the glass. The needle drops on the little plastic record player and a swing waltz begins to play. Again the mother taps the window and one of the little tin soldiers steps forward, hangs his rifle on the gumball dispenser knob, and gives a jerky bow. The little girl giggles. Her mother taps the glass a third time and the soldier starts to tap-dance, windmilling his arms and kicking up his heels. The child watches him, thoroughly delighted, and after a time the mother rests her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and murmurs a few words of encouragement. The girl taps on the glass, and a moment later one of the Holiday Barbies sashays forward. The soldier extends his arm, and they take off round the window display like Fred and Ginger in miniature.
AH, MISTLETOE: “witch’s broom” they called it, in a more superstitious time. People believed a sprig of mistletoe above the doorway would prevent us crossing their thresholds. We’ve put it up every Christmas for as long as I can remember.
The rest of the family, parrot included, has gone to bed by the time I’ve tacked a sprig above the sitting room door. Irony aside, I don’t know why we bother, considering how few men there are to snog—and most of them related to us besides.
As you may know, Yule was one of the pagan winter-solstice festivals that gave way to modern Christmas. As with the Roman Saturnalia, our holiday is more an excuse to carouse than anything else, though it being our time of covention we do get a bit of business taken care of in between. We put up a Christmas tree, too, for the little ones. There isn’t a whole lot of gift-giving though, as presents are generally only exchanged among members of one’s immediate family. I have found my sisters’ gifts at Fawkes and Ibis, of course: for Helena, a set of wooden Lebkuchen molds probably as old as Methuselah—poofed up a duplicate set for actual use—and for Morven, a red plastic View-Master I’ve fixed to show scenes of the future.
One of our best traditions is the gingerbread house, which we work on for an entire month beforehand. It may seem a quaint pastime by ordinary standards, but we’re making a model of Harbinger House. Everything in it is made out of sugar, which can be spun so finely it’s clear as glass, even the fishbowl on the kitchen counter. Family heirlooms are replicated in miniature, carved out of gumdrops or rock sugar, and all the furniture is made of Belgian dark chocolate. We use graham crackers and vanilla frosting too, of course. And who knew you could get a full palette mixing the food coloring ordinary families use for dying Easter eggs? It was our gingerbread Harbinger House ritual that inspired Mira to take the confectionery course at that fancy-pants culinary academy in New York.
The model is built in halves so that you can open it and peer into each of the rooms, even the ones that exist only for the occasion. We also fashion a sort of candy golem for each guest as well as ourselves; some are molded out of chocolate, others cobbled together with almonds and sultanas. Even the tabby cat is replicated in candied ginger. The house is displayed on a table in the foyer and all the candy golems arranged on the table outside the entrance. Then Helena enchants our grand creation, and the gingerbread house is a complete mirror of the real thing: candy ladies scurrying between kitchen and dining room; candy children making merry (and making naughty); the chocolate figures of all the local beldames climbing the front porch just before the real doorbell rings, and others vanishing off the tabletop just before they appear inside the WC. When we were children we could spend hours at a time giggling at every tiny chocolate dame that popped out of the marzipan toilet. On a more practical note, mothers can ensure the kiddies are all in their beds without going up two flights of stairs to check.
Our other two great traditions are the tableaux vivants—last year’s was The Thirty Heads of Princess Langwidere (to which, regrettably, the little ones responded with more terror than we had anticipated)—and after that the puppet shows. Our puppet stage is a splendid antique. We use the stage at every covention, because it has always been our credo that the things we love best should not be squirreled away for the enjoyment of no one. A grander stage for puppets or people is rarely found; indeed, it is an Odeon in miniature, with swagged curtains of festive red velvet and Atlas-like caryatids holding up the curtain rod, real footlights that cast a golden glow, an intricate ceiling panel painted to look like stained glass, and other fin de siècle flourishes. There are over a dozen backgrounds—Italianate garden, graveyard by moonlight, colonial Harveysville street scene, even one of this very drawing room—that are stored beneath the stage and may be rolled up for use with a little brass crank, as well as a scrim through which all violent or amorous scenes are obliquely depicted.
Using all the marionettes in the house, our coven’s puppeteers reenact noteworthy episodes from coventions past (there’s even a puppet for the Turkey Who Wouldn’t Die, though his squawks are simulated), coven history (this year they’re doing The Trial of Goody Harbinger), and reinterpretations of classic literature (in past years they’ve done Paradise Lost-and-Found, Dante’s Disco Inferno, Off with Her Head: A Love Story in Two Parts, and so forth). For the little ones these puppet plays provide history lessons as well as entertainment, though the funny bits are more Monty Python than Punch and Judy.
And afterward—oh, the feast! We always have a roast goose (no turkey, never again), candied sweet potatoes and stuffing with sage and raisins, fennel sausages and rhubarb pudding and corned beef hash. Every year Helena bakes an ambrosia cake, which is something you will not find on an ordinary Christmas dining table. It is rather nondescript in appearance, but this is a product of its magic. To me it tastes like plums marinated in honey with a hint of cloves; Helena’s slice tastes of pineapple cheesecake; to Vega it tastes like carrots and cardamom, and so on. And like all the other food on the table, the ambrosia cake goes on and on until we can stuff ourselves no further.
I savor the hush that falls the evening before everyone arrives, before every cranny of my childhood home is consumed in the festive chaos. They say the veil separating this world from the next is at its thinnest at the winter solstice, and if that is tru
e then logically Christmas is the ideal time for the practice of necromancy. (You knew those puppets weren’t ordinary playthings!)
Totems, jujus, lares—call them what you like. Late that evening I am sitting by the fire, feet up and savoring a glug of amaretto, when one of the puppets stuffed into the Christmas stockings, a Gibson girl, starts wriggling like a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis.
“You ought to have taken me off the mantel before you lit the fire,” the puppet huffs as the control bar shimmies out of the stocking and falls to the hearth with a clatter.
“A happy Yule to you too, Auntie Em!” I rise creakily, pull her out of the stocking, and position the puppet on a neighboring armchair. None of the other puppets are animated yet. Auntie Emmeline always arrives earlier and leaves later than the rest, the pesky old bird.
She turns to face me and her little painted eyes glitter with shrewish shrewdness. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to, miss.”
You get awfully pushy when you’re dead. Afraid of being forgotten, I suppose.
“You’re asking for trouble, Evelyn. You know you are. Don’t come crying to me next covention time, that’s all I mean to say.”
“If all you’re going to do is nag me,” I say wearily, “then I’d rather you kept to the ether.”
She’s silent for a moment, and I can tell she’s softening. She’d do the same as me if she were still alive, and she’d even admit it if I pressed her hard enough. “Don’t sulk, dear,” she says finally. “You know I have your best interests at heart.”
“You wouldn’t be giving me so much grief over it if he weren’t important.”
“Important?” she sneers. Creak goes the hinge in her little wooden jaw. “All your men are important to you at the time, are they not?”
“Please tell me, Auntie Em. I’d know how best to handle it, if only I knew what it meant. Is he …?” Has Jonah come back to me? is what I’m asking, and she knows it.
Clack, clack, she folds her arms and glares at me. This is Auntie Em for you, hoarding the secrets of the universe like a mother who hides the cookie jar from her children just so she can devour them all herself.
Which is worse, I wonder: having to listen to the overbearing opinions of all your cranky dead relatives, or how it works in ordinary families, when they come back but don’t let on they’re there? Oh, the things that horrify your poor old granny when you believe yourself alone!
“I hope I’ll find you in a better mood in the morning,” I say to the puppet, and she only harrumphs in response. It’s times like this I wish she would hurry up and reincarnate already.
Before I turn the lights off in the parlor I hang an old silk dressing gown on a hook behind the door. This is not exactly a gift for Santa Claus; you’ll see.
IN THE morning I’m woken by voices and bustling below. When I come downstairs I see the parrot is gone; all that’s left of him’s a smattering of silky gray feathers on the parlor carpet. I venture into the kitchen and find Hieronymus enjoying his first pipe of the season, wagging his hairy shin under that old dressing gown as he peruses the arts section. Some of the local ladies are already here, of course, having arrived near dawn to aid Helena in her preparations for the Yuletide bruncheon, and our departed aunties dispense time-honored culinary advice from above the kitchen sink.
I sit down by Uncle Hy and survey the scene along the kitchen counter. These are all my family and friends, so you may be surprised that I can’t say I like all of them. Rather, I like them all but one: Lucretia Hartmann, owner of the toy shop, who has just plucked a mixing bowl from Morven’s hands with the words, “But I can do it faster, dear.”
Granted, when you throw a hundred people into one house for a weeklong shindig you’ve got to expect the occasional flare of temper; but while magic can smooth over a lot, it can’t make somebody likable. There’s a reason why the kiddies call her “Missus Shrew” (only “Missus” to her face, of course), and why she has a staff of part-timers to perform such distasteful tasks as interacting with the customers. Oh, she likes children well enough, but she speaks to them so condescendingly that even the smallest of babes regards her with a moue.
I’ve hardly had a chance to pour my coffee when Uncle Heck breezes out of the first-floor powder room, jolly as the Holly King, with a bulging rucksack full of goodies he’s picked up at markets all over the southern continent. He does this every December covention, arriving to great fanfare among the little ones, who are delighted with his exotic gifts no matter how quaint the plaything or itchy the pullover. The doorbell rings over and over but no one waits to be let inside, and soon every room in the gingerbread house is crowded with our candy golems. You can see a little nougat of a newborn boy child, a Jester, fast asleep in a dresser drawer in a third-floor guest room. He’ll be named tonight. Everyone’s crowding the coffee and cocoa dispensers on the dining room sideboard, and from the kitchen waft the tantalizing smells of roasting chestnuts and gingerbread cookies.
After brunch we put on the tableau vivant in the drawing room. The subject of this year’s tableau is Circe’s Petting Zoo, and most of the girls are wearing long-sleeved leotards and pig, goat, and cheetah masks that engulf the head. (They might all turn themselves into animals proper, but why risk the mayhem?) I’ve made myself a girl again for the occasion, because nobody wants to see a 149-year-old woman in strappy sandals and a palla made of flimsy cotton voile. They’ve decided I should be Circe, of course, since I have a special flair for this sort of thing. Uncle Heck is Odysseus and Uncle Hy is one of his soldiers, whom I’ve just turned into a pig. The backdrop is an Aegean paradise, expertly painted by Dymphna’s daughters.
After the tableau has disbanded it’s time for the puppet shows, and I hurry up the stairs to the bathroom to take off my face. I really ought to put my old hide back on if I’m to enjoy the rest of the festivities; delay much longer and I might collapse into an armchair and nap well into tomorrow.
But I stand there in front of the mirror for a while thinking of Justin, and Jonah, and how this smooth young face masks a silly old hag, primped and powdered. I sit down on the rim of the bathtub and wipe at my eye makeup with a tissue—and yes, I’ll admit, I do end up crying just a little. An unseen hand yanks the toilet lever and I shout, “Oh, for pity’s sake!” over the loud sploshing in the bowl.
I’m startled out of my brooding by someone knocking on the bathroom door. “Eve? You haven’t fallen in, have you?” It’s Morven. There’s a queer note of excitement in her voice, but I don’t think she has to take a pee.
“Go away!”
“What are you doing in there?”
I let out an exasperated groan. “I’m flossing my cooch. Now go away!”
“There’s someone here to see you,” she says—so that’s why she sounds so excited. “He’s waiting downstairs, dear.”
My heart gives a hopeful thump. “He?”
“Yes, ‘he.’ That ‘he.’ Your what’s-his-name.”
“Justin?”
“Yes, him. Have you …?”
“Not yet.”
“Lucky for you. Now don’t keep him waiting any longer, the nieces look about ready to devour him.”
I glance in the mirror one more time and wipe away the runny mascara. Then I hurry down the hall, pausing at the second-floor railing to look at him.
He’s grown a beard, a real beard, full and black, and his perfect white teeth gleam between his perfect red lips. Vega is hovering behind him as he shrugs himself out of his coat; once it’s off she whisks it out of sight, and though she looks like a nymph and smells like a rose he scarcely notices her. “I hope I’m not intruding,” he is saying to Helena.
“Not at all. We were just about to sit down to dinner.” My sister pauses. “Would you care to join us?” This is not like Helena at all. She is so practical and proper that her hospitable nature doesn’t often benefit ordinary men, unless they’re B and B guests, that is.
There isn’t the slightest move
ment now within the gingerbread house on the hall table. Justin looks around him, in the foyer and through the doorways at our multitude of friends and relatives. “I doubt there’s room at the table,” he says with a nervous laugh, and this is when I start down the stairs. He glances up, does a double take, and suddenly everyone in the house is crowded around him, alternately staring at me and staring at him staring at me. This moment drags so thrillingly! I’m glad Auntie Em didn’t let on he’d be here today. It’s the most marvelous surprise I could have hoped for, though I don’t suppose she withheld it for happiness’s sake.
As my bare foot touches the first step he reaches forward and embraces me, languidly, like a romantic hero in a black-and-white film. Then he holds me at arm’s length and surveys me with shining eyes. “You look like a vestal virgin,” he says, and does not seem to notice the collective snigger among my assembled relations.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. “Is Fawkes all right? Why aren’t you with your family?”
“Fawkes is fine. They’ve hired a nurse for him. My parents thought I’d be in Hungary over the holidays, so they went down to Florida for the week. Uncle Harry’s gone up for a nap now so I thought I’d come over.”
I glance through the drawing room doorway and see our young puppeteers standing behind the stage staring at him, marionettes dangling from their hands, our wimpled granny jujus gone limp just as if they were ordinary toys.
“But I’m afraid I’ve—”
“No, no, you haven’t interrupted anything,” I cut in. “They can finish the puppet show later.” Couldn’t go on with The Trial of Goody Harbinger with him here, that’s for certain.
“Your aunt was just telling me there’s room for me at the table, but somehow I doubt that.”
“We don’t all eat at once, silly,” I say as I pull him by the hand into the dining room, and I notice that someone has draped a sheet over the mirror above the sideboard. Justin can’t see me as I am in that mirror, but all the rest of them can. I catch Morven’s eye, smile a smile of gratitude, and she gives me a wink. Then I skip down the sideboard piling a plate with goose liver and sage stuffing and bid him sit, put the plate before him, ask him if he’d like a spot of bubbly.
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