Comfort and Joy

by Jim Grimsley

  He could find no place for himself here and now, in the backyard of this house in which he had spent most of his childhood, or in the lives of his parents.

  He passed a nearly sleepless night in the room of his boyhood, long since transformed by his mother into another showplace for antiques. His speech to his father replayed itself in his head through most of the night. Toward morning he dreamed he had brought McKenzie home with him for Christmas, a long, formless dream that he failed to remember on waking. But the renewed image of the young man left him aching and full of dread.

  Christmas Day passed peacefully, despite the tension that remained from the night before. Before breakfast, Mother approached him in the sun room and told him that both she and his father had agreed to let the subject drop for this trip, for the sake of the holidays. "But Ford," she said, "it's really time we had a long talk about this whole subject. This is twice you've told your father you don't want to get married. And while you may be an adult now and this may be your decision, it's certainly something that involves your family. We all know how busy you are and how difficult it is for you to travel, so your father and I would like to come to Atlanta to talk to you about this."

  "I think that's a better idea than trying to deal with it on Christmas." Ford felt suddenly exhausted.

  "Good. Now you think about when you want us to come and let us know. But I'm perfectly serious about this."

  "I'm taking you seriously, Mother."

  "I thought this was what you and that therapist were supposed to be working on," with a slight lift of her upper lip.

  Ford contained a flash of anger. "I thought we were going to save the whole subject for another time. All right?"

  The social guise, which he had seen her assume in many other situations, kicked in automatically. "You're right. Now, I've got to get Christmas breakfast. You know, I actually do feel like cooking this morning."

  Father awaited them in the kitchen, leafing through the thin Christmas morning edition of the News-Press. Already showered and shaved, he had dressed in the battered green cardigan with red buttons that Mother called his Yuletide sweater. He folded the paper and lay his reading glasses atop it. Mother said, "Ford agrees we have a wonderful plan for settling this whole issue, Keith. I think everything's going to work out just fine."

  "That's good to hear." Father wore the placid expression reserved for cocktail parties and difficult legal negotiations. "I'm glad no one wants to spoil Christmas with the kind of talk we had last night."

  Ford put out his hand and Father shook it firmly. "No one wants to spoil anything. I'm just happy to be home for the holidays."

  "You can't expect this kind of easy schedule every year. I remember a couple of Christmases I had to miss, when you and your sister were young."

  Christmas breakfast proceeded, managed with aplomb by Mother in spite of the fact that she rarely used the kitchen. Courtenay stumbled into the kitchen for coffee and found Ford and her father sharing stories about Grady. Ford told the story of the bus accident and the ensuing headaches. "The place is stuffed to the gills now," Ford said. "The administrators talk about renovating, but nobody believes they'll ever get it done."

  "I was there the first day we rolled a patient into the new building, out of the old White Hospital. I was a student, I believe. I'll never forget it."

  Following breakfast, the family proceeded with the opening of gifts. Ford helped set up new woodworking tools in Father's shop, an immaculate room in the basement. At the center of the room stood Father's current project, a large chest with an elaborately carved lid, partially completed. Cedar smell permeated the room. Father indicated the chest. "For your sister. Your mother wants to call it a hope chest, but I told her I don't think modern girls have hope chests anymore."

  "It's lovely. You're spending a lot of time on it."

  Father chuckled. "Time I don't have, you mean. You're beginning to see what it's like, aren't you? Trying to take care of sick people and have a life too."

  Ford ran his palms lightly over the surface, from the smoothed, finished middle to the rough edges. Dad continued, "It all gets easier after a while. Don't worry. Just listen to your mother and me. We got through it."

  Upstairs, Mother and Courtenay were putting together a modest Christmas dinner intended to feed the immediate family plus Father's uncle Paul, one of the elders of the McKinney clan. Later in the day, the whole clan would assemble on the Isle of Hope in the home of the ranking elder himself, Father's uncle Reuben. The visit to Uncle Reuben had been customary since as far back as Ford could remember.

  Once the holiday settled into its usual shape, a spirit of peace did finally overtake each of them. The children remembered what it had been like to depend on these adults, to be protected by them, to be within their power. They remembered how it had felt to be small in this house, to wake up on other Christmas mornings, when the promise of gifts had meant sleeplessness and anticipation. The parents remembered their own benevolence, which had seemed so automatic when the children needed everything, which was sometimes absent now that the children had grown.

  Ford drew his usual assignment, fetching Uncle Paul. The drive to the large house on East Oglethorpe gave him a moment of solitude in which to breathe. Uncle Paul waited in the front parlor, clutching his ivory-handled cane and his favorite lap rug. Since he rode everywhere in a wheelchair, the cane served a purely ornamental function, but he refused to part with it.

  As Ford started the car, easing the vehicle onto East Oglethorpe, Uncle Paul asked, "Is this a new car?"

  "No, it's not." Ford shook his head no. Uncle Paul looked at him skeptically. He turned to face out the front window, hunched forward. According to Father, Uncle Paul once stood nearly six feet tall himself—short, for a McKinney—but due to curvature of the spine and general decay he could barely see above the dashboard now.

  Uncle Paul was allowed the head of the table, where he confined himself to peering between water glasses and drinking a good deal of wine. When he decided to speak, he reared back in his chair, bringing his head above the level of the glassware, and sighed deeply. Conversations with Uncle Paul were generally brief, as today, when the maid poured his second glass of wine and Uncle Paul lifted it from the table, fixing Father with a stare. "You got a new car."

  "No." Father found it unseemly to raise his voice in order to be heard, so he sat next to Uncle Paul and spoke close to Uncle Paul's ear. "You know I would never sell that car. Too many good miles on it."

  Uncle Paul had sold Father the vintage Mercedes a decade ago, but lately had become convinced that Father had traded it in on a new model. No one knew why, exactly. Uncle Paul announced, "It's not the same color." Setting the wineglass on the table, he lowered himself below the rims of the glasses once again, indicating the conversation had ended.

  Father asked Ford, "Did you remember we called you Ford Jr. when your grandfather was still alive?"

  That's right," Uncle Paul said, surprising everyone, since Father had been speaking in a normal conversational tone. "Our mama was a Ford, so my papa named his oldest son Keith Ford, after the both of them, and that's where your name came from."

  "I didn't know that," Courtenay winked at her brother.

  Explained Father, "Your great-grandmother didn't come from the right kind of family, quite, so the McKinneys never really accepted her. That was what my father used to say. But he adored her. Her father came south during Reconstruction, and that was the kiss of death here. Savannah in those days was a closed circle."

  "Do you think it's better now?" Ford asked.

  "Depends on what you mean by better, I guess," Father said.

  The talk about family history echoed through Ford, underscored by the parlor's infamous arrangements of family pictures, some dating back as far as the birth of the photograph. Courtenay referred to the room as Mom and Dad's museum, and today Ford wandered from display to display, studying the evidence of his forebears, mulling the poses of the couples, the taut arms
of the husbands embracing the stiff waists of the wives. Faces presented the bland, impersonal expression with which well-bred people greet portrait photography. Every picture possessed its own history. Ford remembered only scattered names among the older photographs but recognized dozens of his modern relatives. Sipping brandy, he brooded over each expression. Mother joined him, circling his waist with her arm. "Are you having a good Christmas? Are you glad you came home?"

  He returned the embrace, "It's nice to do nothing but eat and drink for a change."

  Lifting one of the heavy silver frames, she tested the glass for dust and said, "Esther hates all this. Nothing but dustcatchers, she says. But this is my favorite part of the house. I do just what you're doing, I wander around and look at all the faces. Do you have any of the family pictures at your house? I can't remember."

  "No," Ford said, "just you and Dad and Courtenay. And Grandma."

  "Well, we ought to give you some of ours, I guess. It's time I started dividing these up between you and Courtenay."

  "It's a little too soon for that. Whenever I need to revisit history, I know where to come."

  "For once, I wish we could stay here for Christmas night. I wish we could all be together, the way we are right now."

  "Is this my mother, trying to get out of visiting Uncle Reuben?"

  She laughed softly "Doesn't sound like me, does it? To tell you the truth, though, I hated going out there the first few years, when you children were young. I wanted my children and my husband and that was all the Christmas I needed. But when I got older things changed. I got used to it all, I guess. And now I can't do without it. Without this," indicating the pictures, the room filled with polished antiques. "Not everybody comes from a family with so much of its history preserved. I think we have a duty to that."

  "A duty to do what?"

  "To continue." She sipped her dark sherry and rested her head briefly against his shoulder.

  "I thought we weren't going to talk about all that right now."

  "I'm talking in general. Christmas makes me sentimental these days, with you children grown. So when you're here, I start to remember how things were when you were little, how happy I was to be a mother." She straightened, looked him in the eye. "There's so much happiness in raising a family, Ford. In continuing the family that you're part of. That's all I'm trying to tell you."

  "Thank you, Mother," he said, "I really am listening." But walked away from her, nevertheless.

  At Uncle Reuben's party, within the gathering of the McKinney clan, he deliberately behaved like a stranger. Paying due courtesy to Uncle Reuben, he withdrew afterward to the side porch, choosing to study twilight over the intercoastal waterway. Courtenay searched him out. Ford said, "I really don't need this much family this year. Do you?"

  "I don't want to think about it," Courtenay said. "I still have a week left. And I have a feeling Mother and I are headed for a fight before I go back to school. The truth is, I'm going to live with my carpenter." Courtenay watched his face for reaction. "We've been talking about it for a long time. If Mom and Dad ever figure that out, I don't know what they'll do."

  "What can they do?"

  "Behave the way they always do. Get very cold and pretend Mike isn't alive whenever we're together. Talk about Savannah boys I ought to be dating. Make sure to tell me every time one of my friends gets married to the right kind of boy. It will be just like what happened when I told Mother I wouldn't make my debut. World War Three."

  "Except you don't live here anymore," Ford said.

  "You can bet Dad will cut off my money."

  "Don't worry about that. I have money. So do you, you just can't get to it yet. I'll loan you whatever you need till you're twenty-five and you can pay me back. And there's not a thing Mom and Dad can do about that."

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. "Thanks for the offer. I hope I don't have to take you up on it, but believe me, I will if I need to." Moving to face him, she took his face in her hands. "What about you? What are you going to do?"

  He watched the last light on the water and the deepening shadows of the yard. "I'm going to visit my singer as soon as I get back to the hospital. And then I'm going to see what happens."

  The two of them returned to the family gathering together, arm in arm, and through the rest of the evening stood guard over each other. Through Uncle Reuben's continual goading of Uncle Paul, through the stories about boat purchases and extravagant vacation plans traded among the uncles, through the cool comparison of clothing among all parties and of jewelry among the aunts, Ford and Courtenay watched, back to back, then moved along parallel lines into the formal parlor, where Uncle Reuben and Uncle Paul argued about the exact date of Uncle Ellis McKinney's wedding. "I said during the war!" Uncle Reuben shouted, inches from Uncle Paul's ear. "During the war! He already had children after the war!"

  By the end of the evening, as happened every year, Uncle Paul and Uncle Reuben refused to speak to each other. This had become the signal for Father to collect his own branch of the clan and return to Savannah, since Uncle Paul preferred to retire from the battlefield once a satisfactory round of hostilities had been completed. Father's theory held that Uncle Paul and Uncle Reuben had lived as long as they had mostly out of spite and anger toward each other. Father asked Uncle Paul if he was ready to leave, and Uncle Paul said, "Leave? By goddamn right I'm ready to leave! Who can sit here and talk to a fool like Reuben all night?"

  "Fool hell!" Reuben said. "You're the fool! Can't tell 1942 from 1948 anymore. You're getting too old, Paul, you ought to go on and die."

  Uncle Paul waved his hand in dismissal at Uncle Reuben. Holding his mother's coat as she slipped gracefully into it, Ford smelled the sweet pungency of her good cologne. She said, evenly, "Well, that's over, anyway," and smiled at her son. "Now we can go home."

  At his parents' house, Ford counted the minutes till he could excuse himself and retire. Having prepared himself to discourage any attempt at conversation, he was relieved when none took place. He rose, finally. "Tomorrow morning I'm taking a taxi, so you folks can sleep it off." He rubbed the back of his head idly. "In fact, if I'm going to be awake when I get to the hospital tomorrow, I'd better go to bed now."

  Saying good night to all, kissing Mother, shaking Father's hand, he thanked them for a fine Christmas and headed to the bedroom in which he slept as a guest of the house. Knowing now, and vowing to remember, that home lay in front of him, in the crass big city nestled at the foot of the Georgia mountains.

  But his mother rose to see him off that morning, greeting him in the predawn kitchen with a kiss on the cheek. Fresh from sleep, she was suffused with gentleness, and he remembered the mother of his childhood. In the long morning robe with the net cap over her hair, she seemed younger, softer, than on the previous evening in her formidable makeup and fashionable evening clothes. She set the coffee in front of him and stroked his hair to the proper line across his brow. Naked of its disguises, her face seemed innocent and whole.

  "I couldn't let you get up and leave us without anybody around." Even her voice lacked its subtle edge of judgment. "No matter how old you get, you're still my son."

  For the first time since he had arrived, he felt at ease with her. She asked what time was the flight and he told her. "I need to call the taxi and make sure it's coming," he said.

  "I'll call," she said. "Sit and drink your coffee till it gets here."

  The car arrived before the coffee cooled, and Ford lifted his overnight bag as Mother stood close by. He embraced her thin shoulders and wondered at her slightness. Sudden sadness gripped them both. "Please take care of yourself," she said. "We worry about you."

  "I'm all right," he said in mild surprise, hearing the taxi horn sound on the dark street.

  He slipped into the taxi, turning once to wave. Framed by the substantial porch, wrapping the quilted robe against her sides, she had become almost a girl again. Her face filled with sorrow as the taxi pulled away. He felt the sorrow e
cho in himself, along with fear. Could he really mean to do what he planned?

  The glorious crimson clouds blazed for the whole of the short jet flight, and Ford sat suspended in the bleeding light. He tried to remember Dan's face and recalled only a vague blur. Any feeling concealed itself.

  The house on Clifton Heights awaited him with calming silence, the soft rush of air through the vents and return, the flush of morning light along the kitchen walls. He wandered through the emptiness, touching the familiars that grounded him: the dumbbells in the den, the black bag that had belonged to Ford McKinney Sr.

  Hours remained before he needed to report to the hospital. He stood in the bedroom, near the place where he had found Hammond. A cold ache filled him, and another memory followed that one: of himself, wandering through the dark house, the evening of the Christmas concert, the Friday of the aborted dinner. The sound of the telephone ringing in his ear but no one answering.

  Memory of Dan's face returned to him, vivid in detail, and Ford remembered the eerie voice, singing not the lullaby of this year's concert but the well-known carol of the year before, To save us all from Satan's power, when we were gone astray.

  Gathering his gym bag, Ford headed to the hospital.

  At the top of the C-wing of the huge edifice, the medical school had installed a gymnasium for the use of residents, who were often trapped in the building for long shifts and unable to reach their usual exercise clubs. Ford headed there, parked in the sparsely populated deck, and strode through the quiet corridors. Hardly anyone had returned from the holidays. He found the gym empty but for one third-year student, a woman named Dorothy Ballard whom he had met here before. "I stayed in town this Christmas," she said. "I learned a long time ago that going home is useless. My lover made Christmas dinner, and we had the best holiday I can remember in years."

  "I wish I'd had the good sense to stay here," Ford said, pretending for the moment that this were actually an option.

  "Do yourself a favor and get listed for Christmas duty next year."