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

by New Yorker

  My cell had cement walls and one tiny barred window. The furnishings were a bed, a washbowl, a toilet, a broom, and two tatami, or rice-straw mats. I wasn’t permitted to sit or lie on the bed until bedtime, and if I wanted to sit down, I had to sit on the floor or on the toilet. Mostly, I chose the latter. Each day I was awakened at five o’clock. Then I had to sweep my cell and make my bed. At six-thirty a guard brought in breakfast, at eleven o’clock lunch, and at three o’clock supper, all three meals invariably consisting of a bowl of warm water, a bowl of seaweed or turnip-top soup, and a cup of cold boiled rice and barley, mixed. At four o’clock the door of the cell was double-locked for the night, and a little later a bell rang, the signal for prisoners to go to bed. The electric light in the cell was turned on and left on throughout the night, shining down on my face. The temperature in the cell was almost always below freezing; I was sure of that because the water in the basin placed under the defective drain of my washbowl almost always had a coating of ice. It was only in bed that I had any chance of thawing out, if not precisely of getting warm. I spent a good part of my day, therefore, looking forward to four o’clock.

  I had been in Sugamo just a few days when I made the unJapanese mistake of trying to keep my feet warm. The Japanese always slip off their shoes before stepping on their tatami, and they expect others to do the same. I was more interested in not freezing my feet than in observing this picturesque custom, and often, in crossing my cell, I walked over my tatami without removing my shoes. Once, as I was committing this desecration, a gold-toothed guard, padding through the corridor on an inspection tour, caught me. “Damé,” he growled as he entered the cell. That means “bad.” Obviously pleased with the result of his expedition down the drafty corridor, he ordered me to take off my shoes, grabbed them, and departed. I didn’t get them back until four months later. In the meantime I had to walk around in my socks. The only advantage of this was that it gave me one more thing to do to occupy my time. In an effort to warm my feet, I could spend many hours sitting on the toilet wiggling my toes.

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  Otherwise, I had two principal ways of killing time. One was to count the branches on a pine tree that I could see from my window. My count varied between a hundred and fifty and two hundred and was never the same twice in succession. To see the tree at all, however, I had first to kneel on the toilet in an especially awkward position, then push open one side of a frosted-glass panel at the bottom of the window, twist my neck, and peer out with my head way on one side. I was able to frame the entire tree in the small triangle formed by the opening in the window. My other principal occupation was trying to recite the names of the forty-eight states. I kept track of my progress by means of nine counters I had made by breaking up a straw pulled from my broom. For three solid months my total was always forty-seven states, no matter what part of the continent I started with. In my mind I could see the Atlantic coast plainly, so I usually started with the Atlantic states, then moved west by tiers of states, tracing an imaginary map on the wall with my finger. But sometimes I would try a name-by-name cruise through the Great Lakes, or take off from the Pacific Northwest. Whichever gambit I used, the total remained forty-seven. The missing state became an obsession. It disturbed me more than the gold-toothed guard, who always smelled of tobacco and made me long for a cigarette—even a Japanese cigarette, which tastes like the stale hay I smoked as a boy. At the end of the three months the forty-eighth state emerged from the back of my head. It was Mississippi. I felt that remembering it called for some celebration, and drank a toast to Mississippi in cold water.

  The acoustics in Sugamo were uncanny. I couldn’t even whisper to myself without bringing the guard all the way down from his station at the far end of the corridor to investigate. My counting the branches on the pine tree or naming the states never did get much of a rise out of him, but on one occasion, early in my stay, I did something that really seemed to worry him. It was when I first happened to think of the fact that Christmas was coming. It was the fifteenth of December. Why, I thought, there are only seven more shopping days till Christmas, and I started to laugh. The guard came trotting down to my cell and walked in to see what was up. He found me still laughing. It was no use trying to explain to him what was so funny, and I didn’t say anything. He stood for a while, looking at me with a puzzled expression, then glumly walked away.

  “Any discount to the trade?”

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  My seventeenth day in prison was the day before Christmas. It was particularly cold and particularly gloomy. My household chores were finished early and I couldn’t even amuse myself by counting the branches of the tree, for it had snowed the night before and the fluffy flakes obscured their outlines. I spent most of the day sitting on the toilet, wiggling my toes. As usual, I was in bed shortly after four P.M., long before it was technically Christmas Eve. After I had been asleep for about two hours, I heard the clanking of a key in my lock. I sat up. The door creaked open and the gold-toothed guard walked in. He was grinning and carrying a cardboard box about the size of a hatbox. He took the lid off and peeked inside. Coming over to my bed, he bowed low, said, “Dozo” (“Please”), and shoved the box into my hands. Inside was an oddly shaped object wrapped in tissue paper. Mighty nice of them, I thought, and I said, “Dom-arigato” (“Thank you very much”). I pulled off the tissue paper. Underneath was an artificial Christmas tree about a foot high and set in a little white tub; its stiff green branches were flecked with artificial snow, which glittered in the electric light. Scattered through the package were bits of tinsel and a number of ornaments—a small silver heart, a miniature Santa Claus, a star.

  “Ano-ne” (“By the way”), the guard said hesitantly. Then, handing me a small slip of white paper, he explained that the tree had been sent to me by the prison officials and that he needed my chop, or mark, on the slip to make it proper for them to take the money for the tree from the cash of mine they had in safekeeping. The tree would cost me, I learned, two yen, or about fifty cents. I put my chop on the slip. I felt sure that the guard had no idea what Christmas was. Where, I nevertheless asked him, did the officials get the tree? It was one of hundreds, he answered, that had been made long ago by prisoners to sell in the United States. I assumed that the war had put an end to that business, and evidently I was the best prospect they had left, maybe the only one.

  The guard left me, slamming the door. I got out of bed and knelt down on one of the mats. I set the tree in a corner of the cell and took the ornaments and tinsel out of the box. “Merry Christmas,” I said to myself, and began to hang the ornaments and drape the tinsel on the tree.

  1942

  A COUPLE OF NIGHTS BEFORE CHRISTMAS

  J. F. POWERS

  In Father Urban’s days of glory on the road, it had been his custom when he arrived at a place to attend to the details of billeting first. Early in his career, this had been a matter of self-preservation; in recent years there had been less to worry about. Pastors had put themselves out for Father Urban, not because he represented the Order of St. Clement—which, as a minor-league outfit near the bottom of the standings, didn’t open many doors—but because he was famous in his own right, as a preacher. Accidents would happen, though, and if Father Urban chanced to draw a bad bed in a rectory where better ones were to be had, he might mention—his manner was laconic—that he was going to a hotel to sleep. Or if he struck a rectory where the food was too bad, he might arrange to eat most of his meals out, sometimes taking the pastor with him—if the fault lay there, rather than with a woman in the kitchen—and thus heaping coals of fire on the man’s head. It wasn’t that Father Urban had “exaggerated ideas of the material side of life,” as one old desert rat of a pastor had tried to tell him. Father Urban could rough it as well as the next one if that was called for, but he saw no merit in encouraging poor hospitality. In a small way, Father Urban had done for the rectories of America what Duncan Hines did for restaurants and motels.
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br />   But Father Urban had become too successful for his own good—or so he sized it up—and had aroused jealousies in the Order. This, he believed, was why he had been taken off the road and assigned to St. Clement’s Hill, as they were now calling the Order’s retreat house near Duesterhaus, Minnesota—and there he had done little. His will, it seemed, had been affected by his transfer and immobilization; he was being made to stand in the corner. His old shock tactics were just not suited to his situation. His mood was strange to him. He didn’t like his narrow iron bed at Duesterhaus, and he knew that better beds were to be had even there, but he wasn’t doing anything about it, or about the almost total absence of heat in his room.

  Father Wilfrid, the rector, was pursuing a strategy that Father Urban understood the reason for—economy—but didn’t comprehend in detail. Some rooms were heated not at all, and some only part of the time, depending on the sun and changes in the weather and wind. The dining room was the one place in the big old house where you could really be out of the weather. In the evening, there was a brief interval when the room wasn’t occupied. This was after Brother Harold, who did all the dirty work, had retired to the kitchen with the dishes, and the three resident priests had gone their separate ways. (In outer Minnesota, the winters—and the summers, too, with their mosquitoes, deer flies, and no-see-ums—play hell with that traditional feature of life in a religious community, the after-supper stroll.)

  One evening late in December, Father Urban had gone up as usual to his cold room to get cigars; Father Wilfrid to his cold office to get cigars; and Father John to the chapel, which was also cold, for a visit to the Blessed Sacrament. (Jack had been assigned to Duesterhaus at the same time as Father Urban, but probably for the opposite reason: lack of success.) Soon the three priests would be together again in the dining room, the heart of the little community at St. Clement’s Hill.

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  The dining room lay directly over the furnace, and was warmed by the kitchen fires and, sometimes, by the afternoon sun. In view of these facts, Father Wilfrid had had the thermostat controlling the furnace moved there. Father Urban had got the impression that Wilf expected to be remembered for this as another man might be remembered for his converts or his work among the poor. “Sure—I could’ve left it in the office, where it was, and I’d have kept warm,” Wilf would say. “But why heat the whole house just to keep one man warm? I’m not the only one.”

  To this, Father Urban, on his arrival at Duesterhaus, had responded “Good idea,” or something like that, but he had since become aware of a serious flaw in Wilf’s argument, and, hearing Wilf on the subject nowadays, Father Urban would say to himself, “Yes, and if he’d left it where it was, we might’ve kept warm, too—in our rooms and in chapel.”

  Visitors were sure to hear about the moving of the thermostat, and even when the four Clementines were sitting around by themselves, Wilf would work it into the conversation. He might break the silence of the evening with it, as if he had intuitive knowledge that one of those under him was about to entertain a doubt as to his fitness for the rector’s job. Father John seldom complained, and was not the kind of man, anyway, that Wilf had to trouble himself about, and Brother Harold, whatever he might think—and he wasn’t so dumb—was loyal to the rector, so it was probably for Father Urban’s benefit that Wilf alluded to the moving of the thermostat. Father Urban reflected that he might indeed lack the virtues of Brother Harold and Jack, but what were virtues in them would be something else again in a man of more vision. Weakness, he thought. He regarded cheeseparing and ineptitude as the special vices of the Clementine Order, and did not suffer them gladly.

  LIFE IN CALIFORNIA

  [Adv. in the San Francisco Examiner]

  Premium cultured white fur Christmas trees. Any size.

  1938

  Father Urban was thinking along these familiar lines when he entered the dining room for the evening. He went over to the Christmas tree and plugged in the cord, which Wilf, doubtless, had been the one to pull out a few minutes earlier. The tree bloomed—red, green, blue, and yellow—in only eight places. Father Urban plugged in the electrified crib that stood under the tree, and slowly oxen, sheep, and shepherds appeared and disappeared, going around and around the Holy Family and the Three Kings. Maybe the animals and shepherds were, as Jack said, a little like ducks in a shooting gallery, but Father Urban had never before seen a crib like this one, nor had any of the others. The crib had been sent by Billy Cosgrove, one of Father Urban’s hottest “connections” back in Chicago. In the short time they’d known each other, Billy, who was in real estate, had provided the Order with an excellent address (offices and living quarters) on the Near North Side, and had shown signs of being just what the Clementines needed—a really big benefactor. He had taken Father Urban’s transfer badly, calling it “one hell of a way to run a railroad,” and what could perhaps have been a mighty river flowing to the whole Order’s benefit had been reduced to a trickle of small gifts. Billy was responsible for the large hamper of food and liquor that was also under the tree.

  There were many presents there, most of them sent by Father Urban’s admirers all over the country, and from among them he had selected his gifts to Jack, Wilf, and Brother Harold. In other years, at the Novitiate of the Order, near Chicago, where he had usually spent Christmas, Father Urban had always received gifts enough to go around, and much appreciated they were by those to whom he passed them on. Christmas just wouldn’t be the same at the Novitiate with Father Urban gone. At Duesterhaus, with only the four of them there, Father Urban was being lavish; most of what he got was junk, of course, but Jack, Wilf, and Brother Harold would all be wearing, eating, smoking, or otherwise using it in the months ahead.

  Nearly all the packages had been forwarded from the Novitiate, for few of Father Urban’s admirers knew his present whereabouts. In his Christmas cards, he had made no mention of his new assignment; it would just seem that he had mailed his cards from some stopping-off place, as he often had in the past. There was no point in going into the details of his life with everybody who sent him a card or a gift, and maybe in another year he’d be back on the road, where he belonged. And, anyway, he was trying not to think about his hard luck during the Christmas season.

  Father Urban liked Christmas—receiving and giving, and having a tree. Until that morning, however, there had been no tree, though the woods were full of them. There would not have been one then, either—a real one—if Father Urban hadn’t acted. Father Urban, when he saw Wilf removing a little wire-and-paper one (apparently the traditional tree at Duesterhaus) from a box, had taken to the woods with an axe. He had operated on the old seminary principle of don’t-ask-unless-you-can-take-no-for-an-answer. Once the deed was done, what could Wilf say? When Father Urban came into the dining room with his tree, a seven-footer, Wilf had said “Well!” but he hadn’t gone on. Maybe he’d recognized only that it was too late to do anything about the tree, and maybe he’d recognized more. “Makes mine look sick,” he had said eventually, surrendering the single cord of lights. The question was, of course, whether Wilf had disposed of the artificial tree or had stored it away for another year. But to Father Urban, who had expected real trouble, the incident was hopeful.

  “Balsam,” Wilf said now, entering the dining room. “You wouldn’t get that nice clean smell with spruce. Cigar?”

  “I’ve got one here somewhere,” Father Urban said. He wasn’t so hard up yet that he had to accept one of Wilf’s cigars, but he had been at Duesterhaus long enough to know that it was a mistake to offer one of his to Wilf. There was a box of cigars waiting under the tree for Wilf, from Father Urban—not the kind Father Urban could use but several cuts above what Wilf ordinarily smoked and was in the act of touching off.

  “Nice,” Wilf said through the smoke.

  Father Urban looked sharply at Wilf, but he was referring to the electrified crib. “Yes,” Father Urban said. “I wonder where Billy got it.”

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��I wonder if it shouldn’t be in the chapel,” Wilf said. “It and the tree.”

  Father Urban moved around to the other side of the tree, controlling himself. He wanted the tree to be where he could enjoy it.

  “I guess one tree wouldn’t be enough in the chapel,” Wilf said.

  Father Urban said, “That’s right.” Wilf had anticipated what would have been his first argument—that they ought to have a number of trees in the chapel if they were going to have any at all.

  “Of course, if we had retreatants here now we’d need trees there,” Wilf said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Father Urban. Who ever heard of retreatants at Christmas? The trees were safe in the woods, and Wilf knew it.

  “I guess the good Lord will understand,” Wilf said, and went to his chair.

  “Who better?” said Father Urban. The good Lord knew what it was like at Duesterhaus. And there were others who knew. When Father Urban had been at Duesterhaus a week or so, he had received a bogus CARE package.

  “Very funny,” Wilf had said at the time. “You know who did it, don’t you?”

  “No.” Apparently Wilf regarded the package itself as legitimate, so Father Urban had said nothing to spoil the illusion.

  “Well, if you don’t know, I won’t tell you,” Wilf had said.

  Father Urban, going by things that had been said before, guessed that Father Louis had sent the package. Father Louis had done time under Wilf at Duesterhaus, was one of Father Urban’s few friends in the Order, and—knowing Father Urban and knowing Duesterhaus—had probably thought such a joke would be worth the trouble.

  Jack, usually the last of the three priests to arrive for the long evening in the dining room, came in and stood by the tree. Father Urban toyed with the idea of waiting him out, making him ask for what he wanted. Jack wouldn’t ask, though, and he wouldn’t use his eyes on you, like a dog, though that was what he was like—a dog that always wanted you to go for a walk. In Jack’s case, it was checkers.