Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art (Modern Library)

by New Yorker

  1944

  (photo credit 25.3)

  FLESH AND THE DEVIL

  PETER DE VRIES

  The office where Frisbie worked as vice-president in charge of purchases had its Christmas party a week early, because the head of the corporation was leaving for Miami, but otherwise it was like any other Christmas party. Everyone stood around self-consciously at first, drinking whiskey from paper cups, then bandied intramural jokes as the liquor thawed them, and ended up by slinging arms around one another in general camaraderie. Frisbie found himself dancing (to music from a radio that had been left in the office since the World Series) with a Mrs. Diblanda, hired temporarily for the Christmas rush. He left with Mrs. Diblanda when the party broke up, and they stopped at a neighboring bar for another drink. Frisbie had told his wife not to figure on him for dinner, as there was no way of knowing how long the party would last or how substantial the refreshments would be. There had been loads of canapés, so little edge was left on his appetite, but when, calling a cab, he offered to drop Mrs. Diblanda off at her apartment and she invited him up for a last drink and maybe a bite of supper, he accepted. They had a couple of drinks, and then—quite naturally, it seemed—Frisbie kissed her. Mrs. Diblanda, a divorced woman of about thirty who lived alone, transmitted a clear sense of readiness for anything, but just at that moment the image of Mrs. Frisbie interposed itself between him and Mrs. Diblanda, and he rose, got his hat and coat, excused himself, and left.

  Now, this forbearance struck Frisbie as a fine thing. How many men he knew—fellows at the office, say—tempted by an isolated pleasure that could have been enjoyed and forgotten with no complications whatever, would have denied themselves? Damn few, probably. The more he thought of it, the more gratifying his conduct seemed, and, presently, the more his satisfaction struck him as worth sharing with his wife, not for the light the incident put him in but as a certification of their bond. Superimposed upon the good spirits in which his drinks had left him, his moral exhilaration mounted. There were no cabs outside Mrs. Diblanda’s apartment house, and, hurrying on foot through a cool, needling drizzle that he found ravishing to his face,

  Frisbie tried to put himself in a woman’s place, and couldn’t imagine a wife not grateful for the knowledge of her husband’s loyalty. By the time he reached home, he had decided to tell Mrs. Frisbie of his.

  It was twenty minutes to ten when Frisbie entered the house. He greeted his wife with a jovial hoot from the hall when she called from upstairs to ask if it was he. He hung up his coat and hat and went on up to the bedroom, where Mrs. Frisbie was sitting in bed, filing her fingernails with an emery board. He answered a few questions about what the party had been like, and then took off his coat and vest and carried them into his closet. “Guess what,” he said from there. “I had a chance to have an affair.”

  The sound of the emery board, which he could hear behind him, stopped, then resumed more slowly. “I say I had a chance to sleep with someone. A woman,” he said. He reached for a wire hanger and knocked two or three to the floor in a tangle. He stooped to retrieve one, slipped his coat and vest onto it, and hung them up. “But I declined,” he said, attempting to strike a humorous note.

  The sound of the emery board stopped altogether. “Who’s the woman?” Mrs. Frisbie asked in a tone slightly lower than normal.

  “I don’t see what difference that makes,” Frisbie said. “All I’m saying is there was this woman I didn’t sleep with. I just have an idea lots of men would have.”

  “Anyone I know?” she persisted.

  “Watch who you’re calling irrelevant.”

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  “No,” he said, looking at her around the edge of the closet door. “It’s no matter. As I say, I got on my bike.”

  Mrs. Frisbie had been looking at the door with her eyes raised but with her head still bent over the emery board. Now she lifted her head. Her gray eyes were flat and opaque. She hitched herself up against her propped pillow and said, “Where?”

  Frisbie’s elation had worn off, leaving him with a feeling of having stepped out on a high wire on which going ahead might be difficult but turning around impossible.

  “Where what?” he asked, taking off his tie and hanging it on a rack fastened to the inside of the closet door.

  “Where didn’t you sleep with her?”

  Frisbie drew off his pants and overturned them. Clamping the cuffs under his chin, he lined up the creases and let the legs drop over. “In her apartment,” he said, slipping the doubled trousers on a hanger and hanging them up. He took off his shoes and set them outside the closet door, finished undressing, and got into a pair of pajamas. His wife put the emery board on the night-stand beside her and thoughtfully shook a cigarette out of a pack. Frisbie stayed awhile in the closet, smoothing down the sleeves of hanging coats and making a check of the garments suspended there. “Two of these suits need cleaning,” he said, emerging.

  In a year or two we are going to try to have Thanksgiving transferred to December 26, but it is not too late, it never is too late, to say a word for President George Le Boutillier of the Long Island Railroad. On the day before Christmas, President Le Boutillier, leaving the Pennsylvania Station in his private car at 9 A.M., made a tour of the whole Long Island system, ending at 6 P.M. “In those arduous but altruistic hours,” said the evening papers, “President Le Boutillier will shake hands with every employee on the road. Each man will receive a cigar and woman employees will get a box of candy.”

  “Sorry to be late, Mom,” one imagines the ticket seller at, say, Wading River, chirping on Christmas Eve, “but I heard that President Le Boutillier was coming along to shake hands with me, so I waited two hours over my time. But it was worth it, Mom. He gave me a seegar. And that isn’t all. When he shook hands with me, he said ‘Merry Christmas!’ We’ll never forget Christmas, 1926, will we, Mom?”

  —ANON., 1927

  His wife struck a match and lit the cigarette. “How did you find out you could sleep with her?” she asked.

  A filament of anger began to glow inside Frisbie. “Just a while ago,” he said.

  “Not when—how. How did you find out you could?”

  “What’s the difference?” he said, kicking his shoes into a corner.

  “You were up in a woman’s apartment with her,” Mrs. Frisbie said. “It was probably somebody from the office. You took her home and went up to her flat.” Her hopeless failure to see the gay extemporaneity of all this galled Frisbie, filling him with resentment. The cold résumé continued. “You were drinking. You reached a point where you could have slept with her, which couldn’t come out of a clear sky but had things leading up to it. What?”

  “If you must know, I kissed her!” Frisbie said, well above his ordinary tone.

  His wife threw back the covers and got out of bed, punching her cigarette out in an ashtray on her night table. She picked up a dressing gown from a chair, slipped into it, and thrust her feet into a pair of mules. Frisbie stood watching these movements as though mesmerized. “It didn’t go any further,” he said.

  She knotted the cord of her robe and drew it tight. “Come on downstairs,” she said. “We’ll talk about it there.”

  Frisbie followed his wife down the stairs, drawing on a warm robe of his own, for the house seemed suddenly chilly. “Don’t I get any credit?” he protested. She marched on, her mules making a scuffing thud on the carpeted steps. “I mean there in my mind’s eye was your face,” he said. “The minute I kissed her, I knew I couldn’t go whole hog.”

  “Fix a drink,” his wife said, turning into the living room.

  “Right.”

  Frisbie went to the cellarette. He had the illusion that it was the dead of night. The ice cubes clacked idiotically into the glasses. He mixed Scotch-and-sodas for both of them. Behind him, he knew, his wife was sitting erect in the middle of the sofa, her knees together and her hands in her lap, looking across the room. “Isn’t there a French proverb ‘A stumble m
ay prevent a fall’?” he asked, and a moment later, “Who said, ‘Women are not seduced, men are elected’? Somebody.”

  “No, this is crazy. We mustn’t.”

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  These remarks were made with no great thought of carrying weight, but were pasted flat on the silence like decalcomania. Frisbie handed his wife a Scotch-and-soda, and she took several swallows and set the glass down on an end table.

  “Now, then,” she said, “how did it all get started? What has there been between you?”

  “Nothing, really,” he said, picking up his drink from the cellarette. He had meant the “really” as an emphasis, but he realized that it came out as a kind of qualification. He walked to the mantel and stood there. “You’re not looking at this thing right,” he said. “Think of it just as the tail end of an office party—and you know what they’re like. People kissing one another you’d never dream of.” He gave a little reminiscent laugh. “Funny—I mean, to stand off and watch all that, which has no connection with their daily lives. Clarke, there, with his arm around his secretary, kissing her. Old H. Denim smacking everybody in sight.”

  “Smacking everybody is different.”

  “I kissed others.”

  It made no sense. They had simply floated off on a cake of ice, Frisbie thought, into a sea of absurdity. That they would at last fetch up on a farther shore he took for granted, though he couldn’t at the moment see how.

  “How can a woman ever be sure of her husband again?” his wife asked rhetorically, and then talked on.

  Frisbie could recall a hundred plays of marital stress in which husbands and wives spatted brightly or tumbled adroitly through colorful arcs of emotion, but he could think of nothing to say now. He frowned into his glass and ran the tip of his finger around the rim. Once, he grinned and looked at his feet. After taking him to task from various points of view, suggesting particularly that he put himself in his wife’s place and imagine what he might think of her in another man’s arms, Mrs. Frisbie broke off and looked into her own glass. “How did you feel?” she asked. “When you—did it.”

  Frisbie spread his free hand in a gesture preparatory to replying, but she interrupted him before he could speak. “No, don’t tell me,” she said. “I don’t want to know about it.” She looked at him squarely. “Tell me you’ll never do a cheap thing like that again.”

  With that, Frisbie’s resistance, till now smoldering and tentative, flared up. He took a drink, planked his glass on the mantel, faced his wife deliberately, and answered in words that surprised him as much as they did her, “A man can’t guarantee his emotions for the rest of his life.”

  His wife rose and strode to the window. “Well!” she said. “What have we here?”

  “Somebody trying to make a mountain out of a molehill,” Frisbie said, warming now that he had found his tongue. “It’s time we went at these things in a grown-up way. Why shouldn’t there be sexual freedom as well as political? Let’s look at it from a civilized point of view.”

  “You must be mad,” Mrs. Frisbie said.

  “Plenty!” he said. “I was reading an article in a magazine—that one right there on the table—some sex facts about the American male, based on statistics. Well, it seems that before marriage the average man has three point five affairs. After marriage—aside from his wife, of course—the average man has point seven affairs.”

  Mrs. Frisbie dug a package of cigarettes out of the pocket of her robe. “Let’s hope you’ve had yours,” she said.

  He calculated a moment. “I’d say that’s the grossest possible exaggeration of what occurred this evening,” he said. “And that so far you’ve got very little to complain of.”

  “Of course, I wouldn’t want a card that says too much.”

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  That way lay anything but reconciliation. Mrs. Frisbie wheeled around. “Surely you don’t mean any of this. You can’t!” she cried. “Or you wouldn’t have brought the whole business up the way you did. You couldn’t get it off your chest soon enough.” The reflection seemed to give her pause. “I suppose I should have appreciated that more, except that you caught me so by surprise.” She assessed this new idea, and Frisbie with it. “You had to tell me before you could lay your head on your pillow. Wasn’t that it?”

  To the many parishioners who sent us holiday greetings we send thanks and greetings. Two odd little incidents occurred. A lady in Toledo sent us a typewritten greeting which we mistook for a manuscript and rejected with our usual promptness and severity. With amazing amiability she mailed it right back; for when a woman wishes us well, nothing can stop her. Another reader, of the opposite temper, submitted for publication a greeting which he had sent to his friends. Everybody had told him it was good enough to print in The New Yorker. He said we could publish it provided we used his name. All in all a flighty season, holier and more larkish than we have known in some time.

  —E. B. WHITE, 1935

  Like a man who, trying to trim his sails to contrary winds, finds a breeze springing up from an unexpected quarter, Frisbie prudently tacked for harbor on those lines. He sighed voluminously and flapped his arms at his sides. “I told you what I did because I thought it was something you ought to know,” he said.

  “You thought you owed it to me.”

  “Something like that,” said Frisbie.

  “Don’t think I don’t appreciate that part of it,” Mrs. Frisbie said.

  “Then let’s leave it that way,” he said, snapping on a table lighter, and, walking over to her, extended the flame to her unlighted cigarette. He lit one himself.

  Still, she seemed to withhold something from the promise of eventual good graces, as though wanting yet a gesture from him to complete the ritual. She prompted him, at length. “You are sorry, aren’t you?” she said.

  Frisbie was reviewing to himself the hour’s events, tracing their origins in that misguided impulse he had had when homebound. “I did a damn foolish thing tonight,” he reflected, thinking aloud.

  “One you’ll not do again if the chance arises,” Mrs. Frisbie said.

  “You can say that again!” Frisbie said, walking back to the mantel and reaching for his drink. “You can certainly say that again.”

  1950

  “I can’t help that. These invoices have to be in the mail tonight.”

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  THE CAROL SING

  JOHN UPDIKE

  Surely one of the natural wonders of Tarbox was Mr. Burley at the Town Hall carol sing. How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became Good King Wenceslas:

  Mark my footsteps, good my page;

  Tread thou in them boldly:

  Thou shalt find the winter’s rage

  Freeze thy blood less co-oh-ldly.

  When he hit a good “oh,” standing beside him was like being inside a great transparent Christmas ball. He had what you’d have to call a God-given bass. This year, we other male voices just peck at the tunes: Wendell Huddlestone, whose hardware store has become the pizza place where the dropouts collect after dark; Squire Wentworth, who is still getting up petitions to protect the marsh birds from the atomic power plant; Lionel Merson, lighter this year by about three pounds of gallstones; and that selectman whose freckled bald head looks like the belly of a trout; and that fireman whose face is bright brown all the year round from clamming; and the widow Covode’s bearded son, who went into divinity school to avoid the draft; and the Bisbee boy, who no sooner was back from Vietnam than he grew a beard and painted his car every color of the rainbow; and the husband of the new couple that moved this September into the Whitman place on the beach road. He wears thick glasses above a little mumble of a mouth tight as a keyhole, but his wife appears perky enough.

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  JINGLE BELLS

  Christmas in the air, everywhere! In Gimbel’s, for instance, where a timid matron, after hovering for a t
ime on the brawling outskirts of the greeting-card counter, finally asked a salesgirl to help her pick out a sympathy card. “A Christmas sympathy card?” asked the girl, brightly. “No, just death,” said the lady. Christmas in the air, in front of the Times Square Horn & Hardart’s, where the pickets walk. A lady started to go in there one day last week with her two small sons. One of the pickets stopped and said to the children, “Santa Claus doesn’t like little boys who eat in Horn & Hardart’s.” The lady had to take them over to Childs.

  —S. C. WESTERWELT AND RUSSELL MALONEY, 1937

  The-ey lookèd up and saw a star,

  Shining in the east, beyond them far;

  And to the earth it ga-ave great light,

  And so it continued both da-ay and night.

  She is wearing a flouncy little Christmassy number, red with white polka dots, one of those dresses so short that when she sits down on the old plush deacon’s bench she has to help it with her hand to tuck under her bottom, otherwise it wouldn’t. A bright bit of a girl with long thighs glossy as pond ice. She smiles nervously up over her cup of cinnamon-stick punch, wondering why she is here, in this dusty drafty public place. We must look monstrous to her, we Tarbox old-timers. And she has never heard Mr. Burley sing, but she knows something is missing this year; there is something failed, something hollow. Hester Hartner sweeps wrong notes into every chord: arthritis—arthritis and indifference.

  The first good joy that Mary had,

  It was the joy of one;

  To see the blessèd Jesus Christ

  When he was first her son.

  The old upright, a Pickering, for most of the year has its keyboard turned to the wall, beneath the town zoning map, its top piled high with rolled-up plot plans filing for variances. The Town Hall was built, strange to say, as a Unitarian church, around 1830, but it didn’t take around here, Unitarianism; the sea air killed it. You need big trees for a shady mystic mood, or at least a lake to see yourself in like they have in Concord. So the town took over the shell and ran a second floor through the air of the sanctuary, between the balconies: offices and the courtroom below, more offices and this hall above. You can still see the Doric pilasters along the walls, the top halves. They used to use it more; there were the Tarbox Theatricals twice a year, and political rallies with placards and straw hats and tambourines, and get-togethers under this or that local auspice, and town meetings until we went representative. But now not even the holly the ladies of the Grange have hung around can cheer it up, can chase away the smell of dust and must, of cobwebs too high to reach and rats’ nests in the piano, that faint sour tang of blueprints. And Hester lately has taken to chewing eucalyptus drops.