by New Yorker
Father Urban decided to get it over with. Since he had to play, he would seem to do so willingly. “Care for a game?” he inquired. “Or don’t you?” He was being cruel to Jack, in a mild sort of way, making it harder for him just when the end was in view. Father Urban felt justified because Jack didn’t realize he was being teased, and he ought to have to pay in some way for being such a nuisance about checkers.
“Whatever you say, Urban.”
“Well, frankly, I’d like to play.”
“Good,” Jack said.
When they had first got out the board, several weeks back, Wilf had played, but either he didn’t like the game or he didn’t think it looked good for him to be beaten, as he was by Jack, and he no longer played. He sat in his chair, with his breviary on the table beside him, and read the paper. If asked to play, he’d answer, “I have some office to say.” Later, asked again and still reading the paper, he’d say, “Maybe after a while.” You understood by now that he had some office to say.
For Father Urban, the really annoying thing about this ruse was that it apparently went down with Jack. Or maybe it didn’t, and Jack just preferred playing with Father Urban. This was a pleasing thought to Father Urban, but only up to a point. Even if he didn’t discover something better to do in the long evenings, he could just get tired of checkers, couldn’t he? The only light in the dining room came from the chandelier, by which he and Jack played checkers at the card table and Wilf read the paper hour after hour. Father Urban wished that it were possible to spend more time in his room—awake, that is. It was cold there—cold beyond endurance, to say nothing of comfort—and Father Urban didn’t want to fall into the practice of going to bed directly after supper. It just wouldn’t look right, and he might ruin his health—or if not that, exactly, so habituate his body and mind to sleep that he’d never be any good after supper. This could seriously impair his usefulness if he ever left Duesterhaus.
“Itjust seems ridiculous to get rid of it now, with Christmas only a couple of months away.”
(photo credit 31.2)
ROOSEVELT SPRUCE
There was such a to-do last week about Elliott Roosevelt’s Christmas trees that we thought we ought to get in on it, so we marched down to the nearest of the vacant lots he rented briefly as sales places in this city. The trees, as perhaps everyone knows, were planted ten years ago by Elliott’s father, are selling at a top price of $1.95, and have been maligned by several competitors as being early needle-droppers and not really Christmas trees anyhow but, to employ a term heretofore unused in local conifer circles, skunk spruce. Luckily, we found Mr. Roosevelt himself at the lot. We asked him first about the skunk-spruce allegation. “Look,” he said, “our trees are Norway spruce and white spruce, mostly Norway. The original Christmas trees in Germany, where Christmas trees originated, were Norway spruce. All over Europe today, Norway spruce is still the traditional Christmas tree. That hundred-foot tree at Rockefeller Center is a Norway. What’s happened in the New York market is this: Most of the dealers here get their trees from Canada, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. They used to get spruce that had been cut in September or October and then tightly bundled. Well, if a Norway’s packed like that, it will dry out in thirty days. So the local dealers switched mostly to balsam, which holds its sap longer. But our spruce, at Hyde Park, aren’t cut before December 1st and aren’t jammed together, and we’ve had tests made showing that you can keep one of them in a house for a month and a half without any appreciable loss of needles. As for our trees having a skunklike odor—well, smell one.” We did. Smelled like a Christmas tree.
This is Mr. Roosevelt’s second year in the Christmas-tree business. (His mother is a silent but enthusiastic partner in the tree venture.) Last season, he told us, he sold nearly twenty thousand trees, in Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park. This year, he expects to sell sixty-five thousand spruce—fifty thousand here and the remainder upstate, in Hyde Park, Poughkeepsie, Buffalo, Syracuse, Schenectady, and Tonawanda. His local lots, which he leased for two weeks, are open twenty-four hours a day, are kept stocked by trucks that leave Hyde Park at two-hour intervals, and are manned by twenty-five young men and women, more than half of whom are actors recruited for the occasion by a theatrical friend of Faye Emerson, who is, of course, Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt. Members of the cast of salesmen have appeared in “Command Decision,” “Dream Girl,” the Michael Redgrave “Macbeth,” and “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.” We spoke to one of the actors, who said that his present job, entailing, as it does, a good deal of exposure to fresh air, is not only remunerative but astonishingly bracing. Another salesman, or saleswoman, is a young lady who was Miss Emerson’s backstage maid during the recent Broadway run of “The Play’s the Thing.”
Some of the sales staff are on the lookout for people who buy a lot of trees, since there is a rumor that some competitors have been purchasing them and reselling them at around a dollar a foot. Elliott doubts that there is anything to the report, because trees sell wholesale for less than he is charging retail. He has himself bought five carloads wholesale, or around twelve thousand trees. “The average dealer,” he told us in explanation of this transaction, “figures he’s lucky if he can sell ten per cent of his trees up to the last week before Christmas. He counts on doing ninety per cent of his business the final week. Now, I sold thirty per cent of all my spruce by the sixteenth, and on that basis I figured I might run out of trees by the twenty-second, so I went in the open market and picked up some balsam. I’ll let them go at my regular prices and still make a good profit on them. I’ve had some pretty nasty letters from other dealers,” he continued. “They claim it’s unfair for me to undersell them. Well, this Christmas-tree business has always been a bonanza, a racket, and, the way I look at it, I’m being fair to the customers, who, after all, vastly outnumber the dealers. Why, I’ll bet I’ve spoken to five hundred people who’ve told me they never could afford a tree before. By the way, I have a hunch that there’s going to be a last-minute shortage of trees around town this year and that by Christmas Eve there’ll be a tremendous jump in prices—except for mine, that is. Care to look at a nice six-footer for only a dollar seventy-five?”
—ROBERT A. SIMON AND E. J. KAHN, JR., 1948
“Hey, take it easy!” said Father Urban. Jack’s right leg, which had a tendency to vibrate during play, had suddenly swung out of control, jarring the card table. And now, with his leg still going, Jack was inching forward, advancing in his chair as his checkers advanced on the board. When he moved, his fingers flew off his men as if he were a virtuoso of the piano. He made one more move and sat back. Sometimes Father Urban could tell more about the game from Jack’s position in the chair than from the checkers on the board. Usually, when Jack retreated in his chair, it meant that the turning point had been reached. This time, though, it seemed to Father Urban that Jack was a little premature. Father Urban made one of his unorthodox moves. It then became clear to him that the decisive action had already taken place on another part of the board and that the game was all but over. They played it out, of course, and Father Urban took his defeat gracefully. It was just a game, wasn’t it? And he didn’t blame Jack for getting excited over checkers. What else, when you got right down to it, could Jack do well? “Yes, I think this is your game,” Father Urban said.
He watched Jack setting up for the next one. Poor Jack! He had once had something of a reputation as a writer, but there hadn’t been a new pamphlet from him in twenty years. In that time, the Order had employed him first as a teacher and then as a preacher, like Father Urban, on the road. Jack had just got by, even by Clementine standards. It really came down to checkers for Jack. Of course, his spiritual life was good.
“What do you know about this game chess?” Jack asked.
“I doubt that you’d do so well at chess,” Father Urban said, thinking he would be better at that.
“Chess is a very old game,” Wilf informed them, from his chair.
Father Urban looked over
at Wilf in annoyance. A remark like that was actually meant to be instructive.
“Ever play it?” Jack asked.
“No, and I don’t intend to,” said Father Urban.
“Well, we don’t have a board,” Jack said, as if to reassure him.
From the other side of the newspaper, which cloistered him from them but did nothing of the sort for them, Wilf said, “Your board’s the same, but your counters are different.”
“Is that so?” said Father Urban.
“Oh, yes. Altogether different. It’s a different game,” said Wilf.
That was the kind of thing that made Father Urban want to fight. “I’d say the principle is the same,” he said.
There was a slight delay before Wilf’s reply was transmitted over the paper wall. “I’d say the principle is the same in all games.”
Father Urban couldn’t think of an exception to this rule. He moved a checker—into danger, he saw too late. He turned again to Wilf, as to a lesser tormentor, and noted the full-page “Season’s Greetings” advertisement by the merchants of Minneapolis. It had candles and reindeer in it; no camels, no crib. Even about Christmas, Father Urban and Wilf had differed. Fire and water. Father Urban ordinarily thought of himself as the fire, but in the matter of Christmas observances he had been the water.
Wilf had been active locally in a crusade to decommercialize Christmas. This Wilf and his collaborators hoped to do by getting people to go to church more and by having merchants emphasize the true meaning of Christmas in their store windows and advertising. Signs and slogans played a big part in the crusade, as they did in Wilf’s own life.
For Wilf to associate with a lot of screwballs was one thing, Father Urban believed, but it was something else again for Wilf to associate the poor Order of St. Clement and the struggling retreat foundation near Duesterhaus with a dubious cause. Father Urban believed that the avowed ideals behind the crusade were best left to the proper authorities; if these ideals deserved dissemination, the hierarchy would know it, and whatever was done, or not done, should be done under their auspices. If Wilf had expected Father Urban and Jack to follow in his steps, he must be badly disappointed. They had taken no part in the crusade. For this reason, perhaps, it had never been discussed at Duesterhaus. Father Urban had stayed clear of the whole business until the very last.
(photo credit 31.3)
But he had recently gone to Olympe, a town of fifteen thousand, to address the Lions Club on another subject, and there, during the question period, he had been asked about the crusade. In reply, he had said that he found Christmas as it was celebrated nowadays still pretty much to his liking. He felt that merchants, to mention only one group, were doing honor in the way best suited to them and their talents. He cited the example, from literature, of the mute tumbler whose prayer took the form of acrobatics before the altar of Our Lady.
This had gone over very well with Father Urban’s commercial audience. He had been asked, however, if his position wasn’t the opposite of that held by the man in charge of St. Clement’s Hill—and if so, how come? Father Urban had got out of this rather nicely by saying that what the questioner referred to as his position was hardly a position; it was simply an opinion, as, indeed, was the contrary view. There had always been differences of opinion in the Church, and, indeed, such could occur in any organization, and perhaps even in the best-run families, between husband and wife—so he had been told.
(photo credit 31.4)
This had got him a laugh. Then, with the audience on his side, he had become serious. He was not saying that differences of opinion were a good thing in themselves, but he did think there was much to be said for taking them for what they were—healthy manifestations of the democratic process. If his audience thought the difference of opinion in question was bad, they should hear of some of the others that arose between “the man in charge” and himself. For example, the foundation had been known as the Retreathouse of the Order of St. Clement, and when they were renaming the place—which he hoped his audience, Catholic or not, would find time to visit—the man in charge had been in favor of calling it Mount St. Clement, whereas Father Urban had wanted it to be St. Clement’s Hill, and they had called it the latter. Here Father Urban did a double take and said, “I wonder how that happened!”
They had loved him in Olympe. He had sunk his teeth into a real audience again, and it had tasted good to him after more than a month of confinement at Duesterhaus. This was the sort of thing that had kept him going in the past. At Duesterhaus, without it, he would waste away, he feared. But oh, he had checked Wilf’s fire, and, what was more important, he had taken the heat off the Order—off St. Clement’s Hill. In fact, he had put the place on the map for a lot of people who mattered in the area. Unfortunately, although his remarks about Christmas were fully reported in the Olympe daily paper and reprinted in the Duesterhaus weekly, Father Urban hadn’t been picked up by the Twin Cities papers, in one of which Wilf had been described as a purist about Christmas, the scourge of Santa Claus and all his works. Father Urban sent Billy Cosgrove the accounts from the Olympe and Duesterhaus papers—just for the laughs, he said—but in truth he was rather pleased with his remarks and imagined that Billy would be.
Jack was setting up the board for another game.
“Say,” said Father Urban, and, having said that much, didn’t know how to go on. Luckily, Brother Harold entered the dining room, his kitchen chores completed. “Say, maybe Brother, here, would like to take my place,” Father Urban said.
“No, Brother’s got his work to do,” Wilf said.
“I thought so,” said Father Urban.
He watched Brother Harold, who was studying showcard painting by mail, go over to the sideboard and get out his equipment. His work hung over every door—literally every door—in the house: “CLOSET,” “TOILET,” “ATTIC,” “ROOT CELLAR,” and so on. He had labored all through the autumn on signs for Wilf’s crusade, and he was now working on a commission from Wilf’s brother, who ran a variety store in Berwyn, Illinois. Brother Harold hoped to break into the sacred-art field later on. Wilf had promised him the chapel when he was ready for it.
“If you’d rather not play,” Jack said to Father Urban.
“Not at all. I just thought I’d give somebody else a chance. Go ahead.”
“Go first?”
“Why should I go first? You won the last game, didn’t you? The one who wins goes first. Let’s play the game.” Father Urban was sore. It was getting pretty bad when Jack, of all people, could condescend to him, and when it was assumed by everyone that he had nothing better to do with his time than play checkers—unlike Wilf, with his paper, and Brother Harold, with his work. It was only out of consideration for Jack that Father Urban played checkers at all. He didn’t like the game, and he wasn’t much good at it—though this was maybe the fault of the game itself. He was suspicious of checkers as a game. He wondered if its complexity might not be an illusion, if, in fact, there was much more to checkers than there was to ticktacktoe, and if Jack (because he got to move first each time, and made no mistakes) could ever be beaten again.
A few minutes later, Jack suddenly sat back in his chair, abandoning the game. He said that a long-distance call for Wilf had come in that afternoon. The caller had been a reporter. For Father Urban, this was the absolute limit; he couldn’t recall anything like this—Jack talking to someone else in the room while a game was in progress.
“From the Twin Cities?” Wilf asked. He had let down the wall, the better to talk to Jack.
“Yes, but I don’t remember which paper,” Jack said.
“Did he say he’d call again?” Wilf asked.
“No, he didn’t.”
“And probably won’t now,” Wilf said. “Too late. Probably had to make his deadline.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“Not your fault,” Wilf said, and to Father Urban he didn’t seem as disappointed as he should have been at missing a call from a reporter.
Jack was worried. “I told the operator you weren’t here, but this fellow told her he’d speak to anybody.”
“Sounds like a deadline to me,” Wilf said. He either was or thought he was familiar with newspaper parlance and practice. “What’d the fellow want—another statement on the campaign?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I didn’t have anything to say. I realize now the call was simply a waste of the paper’s money.”
Wilf nodded gravely. “I only hope the fellow didn’t take it amiss.”
“He didn’t seem to,” Jack said.
“I hope not,” said Wilf. He put up the wall again. “You never know when we’ll need those fellows in our work.”
Here Father Urban—who felt Wilf had implied that if Jack had seen fit to make a statement it would have been in support of Wilf’s cause— intervened. “In my opinion, Jack did the right thing,” he said. “He didn’t have anything to say, so he didn’t say anything. I’d say you can do a lot worse than that.”
Wilf made no reply. And Father Urban believed he knew why. He believed that Wilf wanted out of the crusade but had seen no honorable way out until Father Urban spoke to the Lions. Wilf, he thought, now realized that by accepting Father Urban’s view (the essence of which was charity, rather than holier-than-thou singularity) he would not be going back on his cause but going beyond it, and so, in a larger sense, on with it. Wilf, whether he liked it or not, had had a lesson from Father Urban in what the Episcopalians called churchmanship.
(photo credit 31.5)
“Take your time,” Father Urban said to Jack, who was meditating his next move, and stood up to stretch. He looked at the tree and then went over to it and squatted down. There was something wrong. The inside of the stable was rather dim, because Father Urban had chosen to illuminate it with a dim blue bulb, but he could see that the bambino wasn’t in its place. It hadn’t fallen out of bed from the vibration of the turntable. It wasn’t lying on the floor of the stable. The bambino was gone.