by Jack Kerouac
From the open door of the church warm golden light swarmed out on the snow. The sound of the organ and singing could be heard.
Inside the church there was the delightful smell of overcoats fresh from the cold night mingled with the incense and flowers. Everyone was settling down for Mass, the men fingering their hats devoutly, blowing their noses, looking around and nodding, the women adjusting their hats and prayer-beads with sharp prim movements.
Mickey gazed with fearful awe at the beautiful crib on one side of the gleaming white altar, representing the Christ child in the manger, the mother Mary bending over him silent and immobile, Joseph standing mournfully by, all of it bathed in the soft blue light that came from the enormous star. The three Wise Kings stood apart, with concentrated devotion, frozen in sorrowful intensity, as though they knew that the whole world was looking at them and the moment must never be disturbed, nor the little Child Jesus who lay in the crib in a halo of silent miraculous light.
The choir boys, who had been quietly assembling on each side of the altar, began to sing in small high voices.
“Oh, they sing like little angels,” whispered the mother ecstatically to Ruth, and she dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. “I can’t help it, I have to cry when I hear those sweet little voices.”
Three little girls, wearing the uniform of the church’s sodality, came out and stood in front of the communion rail and raised trumpets to their lips, while titterings went softly around the pews, and in clear though occasionally flat tones they began to play “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” The voices of the choir boys and the sudden soft inclusion of the organ accompaniment turned the rendition of the little girls into a huge success, and when they hurried back to their front pews everybody was smiling benevolently in their direction.
Finally the priest came out followed by his train, and everybody rose for the beginning of Mass.
Standing next to Mickey throughout the Mass was a wiry little man who gave off a very strong odor of alcohol. He stood stiffly and motionlessly with his hands clasped to the pew in front of him or sat in an erect and rigid posture without moving a muscle, as though he might have been afraid that the slightest move would betray the fact that he had been drinking. When he kneeled, he lowered himself with slow and painful dignity to the knee-rest and hooked his elbows over the pew, taking firm hold with his hands, in a movement that was furtive and at the same time singularly devout. Mickey could not take his eyes off the man’s great powerful brown hands as he draped them over the pew and clutched at the wood, at the great knots of muscle and vein on them and at the large black rosary beads that were wound delicately about the hands and hung rattling gently against the back of the pew. It seemed strange to Mickey that this man had come to midnight Mass. In spite of his small stature he looked fiercely powerful and strong, almost savage, his eyes were dark and authoritative and the cords in his windburnt neck stood out like pillars, and he seemed to Mickey like a wild hermit from a mountain cave with all his silent ferocious mien.
When communion time came, the man turned to the big woman next to him, and nodded to her, and instantly a file of children started from the pew followed by the big woman and the little man, who walked and hobbled like the bow-legged French-Canadian farmer that he was. They all marched slowly down to the altar where the little man ordered the procession of his family along the altar rail by a series of imperceptible signs. Mickey watched broodingly as the man and his family kneeled at the altar.
The little altar bell jingled as the priest raised the ciborium. Everybody in the church lowered their heads, but Mickey raised his head slightly and thrilled at the sight of the vast plane of bowed heads everywhere, until he caught the eye of another little boy who was looking around, and they both dipped back quickly.
Mickey was now growing a little tired of the Mass. He wanted to go back home and open the presents and see what he had for Christmas. But he began to do another rosary on his beads for fear he had not prayed enough. It was then that his pensive gaze fell once more on the manger scene beside the altar, and a shiver of surprise ran through him. For a moment he imagined that he himself lay in the crib, that he himself was the Christ Child and that the Virgin Mary was his own mother. This strange feeling grew in him until he held his gaze fixed on the beautiful scene hypnotized with wonder. The scene almost seemed to come to life for him and he fancied that he had seen a blush of pleasure growing on Mary’s cheeks. And at that precise moment, a low mournful note from the organ filled the church, and with unaccountable swiftness Mickey’s eyes burned with imminent tears.
He was carried away by a fearsome emotion of great sadness, the kind he felt when he was alone in his room in the middle of the night.
Then the boy looked up again at the altar manger and saw that he too must suffer and be crucified like the Child Jesus there, who was crucified for his sake, who pointed out his guiltiness that way, but who also pointed out what was going to happen to him, for he too, Michael Martin, was a child with a holy mother, therefore he too would be drawn to Calvary and the wind would begin to screech and everything would get dark. This would be sometime after he was a cowboy in Arizona on the Tonto Rim.
And then he thought about his brother Charley. Did he hurt him that time when he threw a piece of slate, and it hit Charley in back of the head, and Charley ran in the kitchen crying?
“Charley! Charley!” the boy thought to himself with anguish. “I didn’t mean to do it, honest! I didn’t know! Forgive me, God!—Jesus!—Joseph! Charley, forgive me! Like Pa forgave you for breaking those windows! Oh, Charley, will my Christmas present make you glad? Will it make you like me? It’s a good scout knife, I bought it on money I saved since way back in October.” These were little Mickey’s rushing inward-tortured thoughts—and he sighed now, suddenly.
The altar boys were singing again, with a vigorous tone of completion, the Mass was almost over. The altar boys were sinners and hypocrites, he knew some of them, especially Mulrooney there in the back, so innocent-looking, who killed snakes along the river by frying them in tin cans, and blew up frogs with straws, and the blond boy Bailey who sold newspapers and hit Raymond one day in the schoolyard and made his nose bleed. But they too were being saved. Although they could do what they liked: he was headin’ West himself, soon, mebbe.
Suddenly Mickey wondered if everybody else believed in God like he did. They had told him Santa Claus first—he was God’s friend, they said—but now he knew that was just a lot of stuff for kids. Was God really everywhere around and not just sitting in heaven not looking down? Everybody in church went about under God’s look like they were only lining up after recess, and yawning, and coughing, and fidgeting. The little noises of noon and the smell of lunches and orange peels and the crunching of shoes in the gravel in the schoolyard: that wasn’t God! And the priest talking about how the people did not give enough for the parish, and the way the people threw their money in the baskets, angrily almost, that wasn’t God! All this shuffling and coughing and nose-blowing in the church wasn’t God!
Yet all the beautiful singing and the organ in the church, yes, it was God’s music for God. But he also liked “Home on the Range” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” just as much. These songs made him see the cowboys loping across the sage on their mustangs in the big sad sunset and made him cry for the death of waddies in the Montana roundup.
Now, in a minute, it would be time to go home, to walk in the late night among all the people smoking and laughing and heading home to open presents and eat and celebrate, and across the field, under the stars, in the shadows of the houses where the little kids were sleeping, maybe this year he would see the Angel walking in the snow at last.
[11]
On new year’s eve the snow was flying in large soft flakes over Galloway. In Daley Square the snow fell upon the festive crowds hurrying to a thousand and one destinations and celebrations in theaters, nightclubs, bars and private parties all around town. The whole town seemed ste
eped in joyous, far-crying silence in the breathless snowfall, all of it giving the night a mysterious and thrilling excitement that was everywhere in the air.
Peter and Alexander Panos were seated in the Square cafeteria by the big plate glass windows facing the street, both of them full of wild anticipation, waiting for the others to meet them there, meantime discoursing excitedly. They were to meet Peter’s gang in front of the cafeteria, after which they were all to go to a Rooney Street saloon to meet up with some of Alexander’s friends. There was a dance at the Admiral Ballroom that Peter wanted to attend, there was a party somewhere else, and the whole night was throbbing and unfolding nervously, happily. In the short time left to themselves alone in the cafeteria Alexander was busily engaged in making his usual report to Peter about what he had been doing all week, and inquiring eagerly after Peter’s activities, as though he hadn’t seen him for years, as though they had but a few hours left on earth together.
“Time! Time!” cried Alexander. “There’s my greatest enemy. There are so many things to learn, to do, and time rushes past! I should be finished with my research on Byron within a week. How I have been working on that thing! After that, Pierre, I’m going to embark on a thorough study of philosophy. You should see my room! Yesterday I read and wrote for eighteen hours straight and in that time I drank sixteen cups of coffee and smoked three packs of cigarettes. The place is literally a battlefield of paper strewn all over the bed, the chairs, the floors!” And Alexander cast a melancholy look at Peter and held out both his hands helplessly. “But Byron … that ultramagnificent Byron! ’Tis time this heart should be unmoved since others it has ceased to move … Oh, God!”
“I wonder when those guys will get here!” said Peter absentmindedly.
“Don’t you see the sweep of that remark?” cried Alexander. He ruminated darkly awhile, resumed suddenly on another tack: “At any rate my study of philosophy will be as thorough as time will permit. That’s the whole trouble with these dramatic schools—the emphasis is on art and the drama, there’s so little to be learned there in the way of philosophy and history—don’t you see?” At this time he was attending a dramatic school in Boston, and rushing around with exotic little girls in slacks who wanted to be like Luise Rainer. These were his happy days.
“We’ve got to get to a liquor store soon,” put in Peter anxiously.
“Yes, oh, yes, Pierre. Oh, I forgot to tell you! I met a real Norwegian in Boston this week who attended one of our rehearsals. He told me about his brother in Oslo who died leaving behind huge great unpublished piles of writing! Imagine—and you should have seen this Norwegian fellow; he’s a simple man, married, with three children in Kristiansund.” Alexander smiled his great twisted smile and shook his head sadly and looked at his friend. “Just an ordinary man, Pete, but in his commonness there was a touch of greatness. Do you understand?” He looked anxiously for Peter’s reaction.
Peter nodded. Then he cried: “Where are those damn guys! Here we are with a thousand things to do, it’s New Year’s Eve, it’s eleven o’clock, and they fool around and keep us waiting. I’ll bet I know what happened: Danny’s singing a song in the middle of the street, they can’t get him in the car, he’s plastered to the gills. What a bunch of guys!”
“Yes, Peter,” echoed Alexander slowly, raising an eyebrow, “what a bunch of guys.…”
“There you go again!” laughed Peter, jabbing Alexander in the shoulder. “A Norwegian guy you like very much, you said he was an ordinary man. But just because my gang aren’t intellectuals you don’t like them.”
“But I do like them!” corrected Alexander gravely, slowly. “Ernest Berlot I particularly like and I’m trying to help him out intellectually as much as I possibly can. I’m having him read the plays of August Strindberg now, you know. Ernest will learn—”
“Berlot’s reading who?” cried Peter with an amazed crazy laugh. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me you’re making him read … plays?” It was too much to believe.
“Why,” replied Alexander, “he likes Strindberg very much. He thinks his plays are very good. He told me so himself. He said, ‘Alexander, these are very good plays.’ He said it just as simply as that.”
“But he’s only pulling your leg, you crazy maniac!” cried Peter. “He wouldn’t read a book for fifty dollars!”
“Oh, no! I saw him myself when I went to his house the other night. He was sitting in the parlor reading Strindberg when I rang the doorbell, I saw through the front window. He was wearing glasses and reading very intently. When he came to the door he said, ‘Al, these plays are very weird but I’m catching on as I go along.’ Don’t tell me about Ernest Berlot. I know him as well as you do now, you know. The others—I’m not particularly antagonistic towards them. Scotcho is a good kid at heart. As for Danny, you know I hold nothing against him, it’s just that he’s smug because he has to work so hard, and makes an awful issue of it. Incidentally, I wrote some more poetry this week.” He rummaged unsuccessfully for several moments through all his pockets.
“Christ-on-a-bicycle! Where are those guys!”
Francis Martin, having diverted his time in one of the Galloway theaters earlier in the evening, came walking slowly into the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. He had just seen a very poor movie which he had expected to be a great deal better; he was engaged in a series of sulky thoughts. When Peter hailed him from the other side of the cafeteria, he seemed reluctant to acknowledge the greeting, and came over slowly.
“Come on with us, Francis, we’re going to have a big night!”
Alexander extended his big paw to Francis, smiling broadly. “I haven’t seen you since New York!” he cried. “How’ve you been? Did you like the movie?”
“You mean the one across the street? Rotten,” said Francis, and with this he sat down at their table, almost tentatively, on the edge of a chair.
“What about it?”
“The gall of that plot. As if it had never occurred to anyone before that a rich idler, by God, can be just as much a gentleman as a self-made man! Isn’t that astoundingly revealing? That Hollywood!” He looked out the window at the rushing crowds.
“What’s on your mind these days?” demanded Alexander with eagerness.
“Flight. I’m getting the hell out of Galloway. I am sick … and … tired … of … Galloway.”
“Wonderful!” yelled Alexander in a bawling voice that drew the attention of everyone in the cafeteria, even the people coming in and out the revolving doors.
“I didn’t tell you, Pete,” said Francis. “A friend of mine is helping me get a job in a music store in Boston. I may be able to live in Cambridge from now on—”
“And then, later, Paris!” bawled Alexander, spreading his arms. “And someday we will all be remembering Galloway and the nostalgia of our youth here. We’ll even remember this night in the cafeteria, on the eve of a New Year, 1941, and lost moments once unwanted. Oh, if I could only find that poem I wrote last night!” He fumbled again furiously among his pockets.
“If I ever went to Paris,” said Francis, unexpectedly pensive, “I think I would be very happy.…”
Berlot’s car finally pulled up in front of the cafeteria, and Berlot jumped out grinning broadly, waving at them in a commanding beck. The two boys, dragging the reluctant Francis along with them, got in the car, which started off instantly.
“You’re late!” Peter yelled happily to the general company, which consisted of Berlot, Danny Mulverhill and Scotcho Rouleau, the three youngsters who had driven the skating party home on Christmas Eve. Alexander and Francis sat back bored.
“You know why we’re late, Zagg?” yelled Berlot, flushed with liquor, eager for the big night. “This crazy bastart Danny here got in a big argument with Richman at the theater … huck huck huck! Tell ’em what you were saying, D.J.”
“D.J. ain’t talking,” replied Danny solemnly. Berlot and Danny and Scotcho were ushers at the Monarch Theater not far from the Square.
; “Two big burpers discussing Wall Street, that’s what they were! Huck huck huck! Imagine talking to his boss like that! Richman actually thinks D.J. knows what he’s talking about!”
“I told him Consolidated Niblick was going up several points before the snow stops flying,” growled Danny solemnly. He was a great character, Berlot was mad about him, and so was Scotcho, and so was Peter. But Alexander hated him somehow.
“There! there! before the snow stops flying, Consolidated goin’ up! That’s what he told Richman!” yelled Berlot, in such excitement that he swerved the car out of its course for a moment and skidded in the snow and started a big commotion in the main street traffic. “Huck huck huck! Tell ’em what else you said, D.J.!”
“Who is Richman?” inquired Francis quietly at this point.
“He’s the owner of the Monarch Theater,” explained Peter eagerly.
“Richman’s main trade is all the old washerwomen on Back Middle Street,” interposed Danny wide-eyed and solemn, staring at Francis whom he knew only slightly. “Every Monday he has Buck Jones and Roy Rogers and big western pictures, and all the old washwomen from Back Middle Street come shuffling into the show with their pots and pans and brooms to see the westerns—”
“They do?”
“Sure! Do you know what they do? They just sit there and watch the picture, they don’t even know what’s going on, and everytime Buck Jones shoots the villain their jaws drop out.”
Francis turned a curious stare to Peter.
“Sure!” yelled Berlot. “Ten cents’ admission. He fills the house with old ladies. And that’s how he made his million! Sure!”
By this time the car was parked not far from the center of the Square, Berlot having driven around the Square three times during the conversation. Now he had turned off the ignition and was leaning back with his hat slumped over his eyes.
“Whattaya want to stop here for!” yelled Scotcho, who sat between his two cronies in the front seat. “I thought we was going to the Rooney Street joint to meet Alexander’s intellectuals!”