I remembered choosing at that moment to look for beauty. And I remembered that it had not happened overnight, but that slowly, the world had come back to me.
When had I stopped looking again? How had I come to China? I had come to China to make something happen, the way I had gone on those 2:00 a.m. walks, hoping something monumental would happen. There are people for whom depression is an indescribable force. For someone like Lizhi, there was no choice, her depression was an illness, rooted in the chemistry of her body, as inescapable as cancer. But then there are people like me, who walk a sort of cliff and who can look into the abyss and know that it is down there, and who have to maintain their balance. I had learned how to balance, I thought.
When had I stopped trying?
“Choose,” said my Christmas Spirit, standing in the black dorm room. I could see the half-lit face of my Christmas Spirit in the little bit of light from the window at the end of the room, barely make out the ancient shape of her head, her heavy lidded eyes. Lizhi did not stir, did not hear, the whites of her eyes like pearls.
“I choose beauty,” I said, thinking of the pale tree and the green leaves and the intense blue sky.
And something happened.
I was alone on the road outside the college. I was chilled to the bone. A person on a bicycle swerved as if I had just appeared on the road in front of him, and maybe I had.
Of course, this is just a ghost story, a travel story. I should stop now, tell you only that I finished my year in China, during which time I made many close friends, and declined the college’s offer to teach another year. That I came home, and went back to writing. That I sold a novel and a couple of short stories.
But I want to say something about why I went abroad. No one goes abroad to go to something. Everybody goes abroad to flee something. One of the people I knew in Shijiazhuang was in remission for lymphatic cancer and had been for three years. He was hiding from death in China, and that year, in January, in the city of Kunming, China, 150 kilometers north of the Vietnam border, seven of us foreigners working together got him on a plane to Beijing so he could fly from there to the Mayo Clinic. The things you flee find you, even in China. But that is another story.
It’s old-fashioned to have morals for stories, but indulge me. I was trying to escape myself, trying to become someone else, someone wise. Maybe I had a sort of blackout on Red Flag Road, or maybe I met an old Chinese spirit. I am telling you now, I don’t know. But some things you must choose. Choose a bad marriage, choose a bad life, or choose to look around you and see.
Household Words; Or, The Powers-That-Be
Howard Waldrop
* * *
“His theory of life was entirely wrong. He thought men ought to be buttered up, and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellow have turkey for their Christmas dinner . . .”
—Thomas Carlyle
“He was the first to find out the immense spiritual power of the Christmas turkey.”
—Mrs. Oliphant
Under a deep cerulean November sky, the train stopped on a turn near the road one half-mile outside the town of Barchester.
Two closed carriages waited on the road. Passengers leaned out the train windows and watched as a small man in a suit as brown as a Norfolk biffin stepped down from the doorway at the end of the third railcar.
Men waved their hats, women their scarves. “Hurray, Charlie!” they yelled. “Hoorah, Mr. Dickens! Hooray for Boz!”
The small man, accompanied by two others, limped across the cinders to a group of men who waited, hats in hand, near the carriages. He turned, doffed his stovepipe hat to the train and waved to the cheering people.
Footmen loaded his traveling case and the trunk of props from the train into the last carriage.
The train, with barely a lurch, moved smoothly on down the tracks toward the cathedral tower of the town, hidden from view by trees. There a large crowd, estimated at more than three thousand, would be waiting for the author, to cheer him and watch him alight.
The welcoming committee had met him here to obviate that indignity, and to take him by a side street to his hotel, avoiding the crowds.
When the men were all in, the drivers at the fronts of the carriages released their brakes, and the carriages made their way quickly down the road toward town.
* * *
Promptly at 8:00 p.m. the lights in the Workingman’s Hall came up to full brilliance.
On stage were three deep magenta folding screens, the center one parallel to the audience, the two wings curved in slightly toward them. The stage curtains had been drawn in to touch the wings of the screen. Directly in front of the center panel stood a waist-high, four-legged small table. At the audience’s right side of the desk was a raised wooden block; at its left, on a small lower projection, stood a glass and a sweating carafe of ice water; next to the water was an ivory letter opener and a white linen handkerchief. The top of the table was covered with a fringed magenta cloth that hung below the tabletop only an inch or so.
Without preamble, Charles Dickens walked with a slight limp in from the side of the stage and took his place behind the desk, carrying in his hand a small octavo volume. When he stood behind the thin-legged table his whole body, except for the few inches across his waist, was fully visible to the audience.
There came a thunderous roar of applause, wave alter wave, then as one the audience rose to its feet, joyed for the very sight of the man who had brought so much warmth and wonder to their heater-sides and hearths.
He stood unmoving behind the desk, looking over them with his bright brown eyes above the now-familiar (due to the frontispiece by Mr. Frith in his latest published book, Pip’s Expectations) visage with its high balding forehead, the shock of brownish hair combed to the left, the large pointed beard and connected thick mustache. He wore a brown formal evening suit, the jacket with black velvet lapels worn open showing his vest and watch-chain. His shirt was white, with an old-fashioned neck-stock in place of the new button-on collars, and he wore an even more old-fashioned bow tie, with two inches of end hanging down from the bows.
After two full minutes of applause, he nodded to the audience and they slowed, then stopped, sitting down with much clatter of canes and rustle of clothing and scraping of chairs, a scattering of coughs. From far back in the hall came a set of nervous hiccups, quickly shushed.
“My dear readers,” said Dickens, “you do me more honor than I can stand. Since it is nearing the holiday season, I have chosen my reading especially, as suits that most Christian of seasons.” Murmurs went around the hall. “As I look around me at this fine Barchester crowd, I see many of you in the proud blue and red uniforms of Her Majesty’s Power Service, and I must remind you that I was writing in a time, more than two decades gone, when things in our country were neither as Christian as we should have liked, nor as fast and modern as we thought. To mention nothing of a type of weather only the most elderly—and I count myself among them—remember with absolutely no regrets whatsoever.” Laughter. “As I read, should you my auditors be moved to express yourselves—in matters of appreciation and applause, tears, or indeed hostility”—more laughter—“please be assured you may do so without distracting or discomfiting me in any adverse way.”
He poured a small amount of water from carafe to glass and drank. “Tonight, I shall read to you The Christmas Garland.”
There were oohs and more applause, the ones who guessed before nodding in satisfaction to themselves and their neighbors.
The house lights dimmed until only Dickens, the desk and the central magenta panel were illuminated.
He opened the book in his hand, and without looking at it said, “The Christmas Garland. Holly Sprig the First. ‘No doubt about it, Marley was dead as a doorknob . . .’”
* * *
Dickens barely glanced at the prompt-book in his hand as he read. It was the regular edition of The Christmas Garland, the pages cut out and pasted in the center of larg
er bound octavo leaves. There were deletions and underlinings in red, blue and yellow inks—notes to directions for changes of voice, alternate wordings for lines. The whole had been shortened by more than a third, to fit into an hour and half for these paid readings. When he had begun his charity readings more than ten years ago, the edition as printed had gone more than two hours and a half. Through deletions and transpositions, he reduced it to its present length without losing effect or sense.
He moved continually as he read, now using the letter opener as Eben Mizer’s quill, then the block of wood—three heavy blows with his left hand—as a doorknocker. He moved his fingers together, the book between them, to simulate Cratchitt’s attempts to warm himself at a single glowing coal. His voice was slow, cold and drawn as Eben Mizer; solemnly cheerful as the gentleman from the charity; merry and bright as Mizer’s nephew. The audience laughed or drew inward on itself as he read the opening scenes.
* * *
“For I am that Spirit of Christmases Past,” said the visitant. “I am to show you things that Were. Take my hand.”
Eben Mizer did so, and they were out the window casing and over the night city in a slow movement. They flew slowly into the darkness to the north.
And then they were outside a house and shop, looking through the window at a large man in old-fashioned waistcoat and knee-breeks, with his spectacles pushed back on his forehead.
“Why, old Mr. Fezziwigg, to whom I was ’prenticed!” said Eben Mizer.
“Ho!” said Fezziwigg. “Seven o’clock! Away with your quills! Roll back the carpets! Move those desks against the walls! It’s Christmas Eve and no one works! . . .”
* * *
As Dickens acted out preparations for the party, his eyes going to the prompt-book only twice, he remembered the writing of this, his most famous story. It had been late October of the year 1843. He was halfway through the writing of Martin Sweezlebugg, had just, in fact, sent the young hero to America—the place he himself had returned from late in 1842, the place that had become the source of one long squeal of protest when he had published Notes on the Americans early in the year. He had gone from triumph to disdain in less than six months. For the first time in his life, the monthly numbers had been a chore for him—he was having troubles with Sweezlebugg, and the sales were disappointing. As they had been for Gabriel Vardon: The Locksmith of London of two years before. (The Americans who were outraged with his travel book were the same who had named a species of Far Western trout after Gabriel Vardon’s daughter.) Between finishing the November number of Sweezlebugg on October 18, and having to start the next on November 3, he had taken one of the steam-trains to the opening of the Manchester Institute of that city. Sitting on the platform, waiting his turn to speak, the idea for The Christmas Garland had come to him unbidden. He could hardly contain himself, waiting until after the speeches and the banquet to return to the quiet of his hotel to think it through.
And since he had a larger and larger family each year to support, more indigent brothers and sisters, in-laws and his importunate mother and father, he conceived the story as a separate book, to be sold at Christmas as were many of the holiday annuals, keepsakes and books of remembrance. Illustrated, of course, with cuts by John Leech. The whole plan was a fire in his mind that night and all the way back to London the next day. He went straight to Chapman and Hall and presented the notion to them. They agreed with alacrity, and began ordering up stock and writing advertisements.
He had had no wild success since the two books that had made his reputation, Tales of the Nimrod Club and Oliver Twist, parts of them written simultaneously, in overlapping monthly numbers, six years before. He had envisioned for The Christmas Garland sales that would earn him £3,000 or more.
* * *
“Show me no more, no more!” said Eben Mizer. “These are things long past; the alternate miseries and joys of my youth. Those times are all gone. We can no more change them than stop the tides!”
“These are things as they were,” said the Spirit of Christmases Past. “These things are unchangeable. They have happened.”
“I had forgotten both pleasure and heartache,” said Mizer. “I had forgotten the firewood, the smoke, the horses.”
“In another night, as Marley said, you shall be visited by another, who will show you things as they are now. Prepare,” said the Spirit. As with the final guttering of a candle, it was gone. Eben Mizer was back in his bed, in his cold bedchamber, in the dark. He dropped his head to the horsehair pillow, and slept.
* * *
Twenty-two years had gone by since Dickens wrote the words he read. He remembered his disappointment with the sales of The Christmas Garland—“Disappointment?! Disappointment!” yelled his friend Macready, the actor, when he had complained. “Disappointment at selling twenty thousand copies in six days! Disappointment, Charlie?” It was not that it had not sold phenomenally, but that it was such a well-made book—red cover, gilt-edged pages, four hand-tinted cuts, the best type and paper and, because of Dickens’s insistence that everyone have one, priced far too low—that his half-copyright earnings through January 1844 only came to £347 6s 2p when he had counted on thousands. That had been the disappointment.
Dickens spoke on. This was the ninety-fourth public reading of The Christmas Garland; his most popular, next to the trial scene from The Nimrod Club, and the death of little Dombey. At home these days he worked on an abridgment of the scenes, including that of the great seastorm, from The Copperfield Record of the World As It Rolled, which he thought would make a capital dramatic reading, perhaps to be followed by a short comic scene, such as his reading of Mrs. Gamp, the hit of the otherwise disappointing Martin Sweezlebugg.
What a winter that had been . . . the hostile American press, doing the monthly numbers of Sweezlebugg, writing and seeing to the publication of The Christmas Garland in less than six weeks, preparing his growing family—his wife, an ever-increasing number of children, his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, the servants and dogs—for the coming sojourn to Italy, severing his ties with Bentley’s Miscellany, thinking of starting a daily newspaper of a liberal slant, walking each night through London streets five, ten, fifteen miles because his brain was hot with plans and he could not sleep or rest. He was never to know such energies again.
There was his foot now, for instance. He believed its present pain was a nervous condition brought on by walking twelve miles one night years ago through the snow. The two doctors who had diagnosed it as gout were dismissed; a third was brought in who diagnosed it as a nervous condition brought on by walking through the snow. Before each of his readings, his servant John had to put upon the bare foot a fomentation of the poppy, which allowed him to put on a sock and shoe, and make it the two hours standing up.
He still had a wife, though he had not seen her in six years; they had separated after twenty-three years of marriage and nine children. Some of the living children and Georgina had remained with Dickens, taking his side against the mother and sister. One boy was in the Navy, another in Australia, two others in school. Only one child, Mamie—“young Tinderbox,” as Dickens called her—visited freely between the two households, taking neither side.
The separation had of course caused scandal, and Dickens’s break with Anthony Trollope. They belonged to the same clubs. Trollope had walked into one; several scandalized members were saying that Dickens had taken his sister-in-law as mistress. “No such thing,” said Trollope. “It’s a young actress.”
So it was; Trollope said he was averting a larger outrageous lie with the truth; Dickens had not seen it that way.
Her name was Ellen Ternan. She and Dickens had performed in charity theatricals together, The Frozen Deep and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour. She was of a stage family—her mother and two sisters were actresses. Her sister Fanny had married Anthony Trollope’s brother Tom in Florence, Italy, where she had gone to be his children’s tutor after the death of Tom’s wife Theodosia.
The world
had been a much more settled place when the young fire-eating Boz had published his first works, and had remained so for some time afterwards. But look at it now.
The Americans had just finished blowing the heads off first themselves, and then their president; had thrown the world in turmoil—which side should we take?—for four years, destroying a large part of their manpower and manufacturing capabilities. What irked Dickens was not their violent war—they had it coming—but that he would not be able to arrange a reading tour there for at least another year. An American had shown up two weeks ago at his publisher’s office with an offer of £10,000, cash on the barrelhead, if Dickens would agree to a three-month tour of seventy-five readings. Both his friend Forster and the old actor Macready advised him against it for reasons of his health. Besides his foot, there had been some tightening in his chest for the last year or so, and his bowels had been in straitened circumstances long before that.
Ah, but what a trouper. He found even with his mind wandering he had not lost his place, or missed a change of voice or character; nor given the slightest hint that his whole being was not in the reading being communicated to his forward-leaning, intent auditors.
* * *
Eben Mizer opened his eyes. How long had he slept? Was the Spirit of Christmases Past that bit of undigested potato, that dollop of mustard? he thought.
There came to his bedchamber a slight crackling sound; the air was suffused with a faint blue glow. Mizer reached into the watch-catch above his bed and took down his timepiece. It was 12:00, he saw by the glow, which slowly brightened about his bed. Twelve! Surely not noon! And not the midnight before, when the Spirit of Christmases Past had come. Had he slept the clock round, all through the sham-bug Christmas Day? He grasped the bedclothes to haul himself out onto the cold bare floor. The overall bright glow coalesced in the corner nearest the chair.
A Yuletide Universe Page 17