by New Yorker
He kissed her lightly on the cheek and looked up at the tree. “Smells good,” he said.
1940
“Do we have any anti-Christmas cards?”
TWO PEOPLE HE NEVER SAW
JOHN MCNULTY
Eddie Casavan and Harry Marnix were walking up Fifth Avenue, around Fiftieth Street, when Christmas suddenly closed in on them. It got a tighter hold on Casavan, but the feel of Christmas clamped down on both of them. The store windows, the sharp air, the lights coming on in the late afternoon, and the couple of drinks they had on their walk must have done it.
They were turning off the Avenue when Eddie said, “I don’t seem to want anything for Christmas any more.”
“It’s for the kids,” Harry said. “It’s a time for the kids, Christmas.”
“Long after I was a kid I still wanted something for Christmas,” Eddie said. “I’m forty-nine and it must have been only a couple of years ago that it came to me I didn’t want anything for Christmas any more. I don’t this year. The stuff in the windows looks nice, but I don’t want any of it.”
“It’s mostly kids’ stuff—things for kids for Christmas,” Harry said.
“I know about that, but it’s not what I mean,” Eddie answered. “Let’s go in this place. I got an hour. You going anyplace?”
“All right,” said Harry. “No, I’m not. Not right away.”
They weren’t high. A little talky, maybe—nothing like tight. Eddie ordered two drinks. “Two Scotch highballs,” he said, the more old-fashioned way of saying what practically everybody in New York now means by saying “Scotch-and-soda.”
“I don’t even want to go anyplace for Christmas, that’s what I mean,” Eddie went on as the bartender made up the drinks and left the bottle on the bar.
“I used to like to go to the six-day bike races,” said Harry.
“They didn’t have them at Christmas,” Eddie said.
“I know it, but I used to like to go to them in winter and I don’t seem to want to any more,” Harry explained. “They don’t have them, anyway, come to think of it.”
“For Christmas I used to plan ahead,” Eddie said. “Even up to a couple of years ago. And I always figured someplace to go or something to do special for Christmas. Now there’s nothing I want and nothing I want to do.”
“They used to yell ‘B-r-r-rocco!’ at the bike races,” Harry said.
That got nowhere, and Eddie and Harry fiddled with the long glass sticks in their glasses.
“There is something I’d like to do at Christmas at that,” Eddie said after a while. “But it’s impossible, maybe nuts.”
“Christmas is nuts, a little,” Harry said.
“Only way it could happen’d be an Aladdin’s lamp. You rub it, you get what you want,” Eddie continued. “Or if one of those kind-hearted demons or something would hop out of that Scotch bottle there and grant a wish. That’s kid stuff, I guess.”
Fragment of conversation overheard on the Congressional Limited: “What I miss most, I miss that prewar Christmas spirit—you know, getting fried at lunch the day before and deciding to go up to Bonwit Teller’s and get the wife a present.”
—C. E. NOYES AND RUSSELL MALONEY, 1944
“Christmas is a kids’ gag,” Harry said. “As childish as six-day bike races, come to think of it. It felt like Christmas walking up the Avenue, didn’t it? What if the gink should hop out of the bottle? What about it?”
“I was thinking that, too,” Eddie said. “He could cook it up for me.”
“What?”
“I’d like to take two people to Christmas dinner, a couple a people I never saw.”
“Yuh?”
“One of them would be maybe forty now, a woman,” Eddie said. “Oh, I don’t know how old, tell the truth. Don’t know how old she was when I first met her. No, wait a minute. The point is, I never met her.”
“Movie star? Some notion like that?”
“No, no. Hell, no. Do you think I’m a kid?”
“No, what I mean is, Christmas is for kids. I didn’t have you in mind.”
“I often thought of her since. This was when I was having it tough one time, maybe fifteen years ago. Living in a furnished room on East Thirtyninth Street—”
“And are they something, furnished rooms!” Harry put in.
“Furnished rooms are something if you’ve lived through and pull out of it you never forget them,” Eddie said.
“I been in ’em.” Harry nodded.
“God, I was sunk then!” Eddie said. “I was drinking too much and I lost one job after another. This time I was looking for a job and coming back every afternoon to the furnished room about four o’clock. That’s how I never saw this girl.”
“What girl?” Harry asked.
“The one I want to take to dinner at Christmas.”
“If the gink comes out of the bottle,” Harry said.
“Yeh, if he does. I remember I’d have a few beers after getting half promises of jobs, and I’d plank myself down on the bed in this little bit of a room when I came home four o’clock in the afternoon. It was the smallest room I was ever in. And the lonesomest.”
“They get lonesome,” Harry said.
“The walls are thin, too. The wall next to my bed was thin. Must have been like cardboard. This girl lived in the next room, the one I never met.”
“Oh, yeh, yeh?” Harry said.
“I could hear her moving around. Sometimes she’d be humming and I could hear that. I could hear her open the window, or shut it if it was raining.”
“Never see her?” Harry asked.
“No, that’s the point of it. I almost thought I knew her, the way I could hear her. I could hear her leave every afternoon, about quarter past four. She had a kind of a lively step. I figured she was a waitress somewhere. Some job like that, don’t you think?”
“‘Season’s Greetings’ looks O.K. to me. Let’s run it by the legal department.
“I don’t know, maybe a waitress, but why, though?” Harry said, and took a drink.
“Why was she a waitress, or why did I figure it out she’s a waitress?” Eddie asked.
“Yeh, I mean why?” Harry answered in such a way that it meant how was it figured out.
“Oh, I could have been wrong. She had some steady job like waitress. She used to come home almost on the dot, quarter past one in the morning. You could set your clock on it. I used to look at my clock when she came in. Gee, her steps sounded tired when she was coming up the hall. She must have worked hard. She’d put the key in the lock and I’d hear that. I didn’t sleep very good then. Worrying about a job, one thing and another. It’d be quarter past one by my clock. I hung on to that clock. I got it yet.”
“Oh, no! There goes our Christmas bonus.”
“Some people hate clocks in their room while they’re sleeping,” Harry said.
“They haven’t lived in furnished rooms,” Eddie said. “A clock is a great thing in a furnished room. This was a green one, ninety-eight cents. In a furnished room a clock is somebody there with you, anyway. The ticking sounds as if you’re not altogether alone, for God’s sake, if it’s only the clock that’s there with you.”
NO FOOLING
Early this month, a man whose garage delivers and picks up his car daily found on the front seat a card reading. “Merry Christmas from the boys at the garage.” He had every intention of sending the garage a Yuletide check for his well-wishers, but he had taken no action as of last week, when he was favored with another card; to wit: “Merry Christmas from the boys at the garage. Second notice.”
—J. SOANS AND GEOFFREY HELLMAN, 1951
“Never saw this girl—that’s what you said?”
“Never saw her. Maybe she wasn’t exactly a girl. I couldn’t prove she wasn’t a woman, older than a girl. When she hummed, though, I figured it sounded like a girl. Funny I never bumped into her in the hallway. Just didn’t happen to. But I spoke to her once.”
“Spoke to he
r?” Harry asked.
“Yeh. It was a gag. I told you I could hear everything. Well, her bunk was right next to mine—with only this wall there. And one afternoon she was getting up and she sneezed. It sounded funny from the next room. So I said very loud, ‘Gesundheit!’ I remember she laughed. Her laugh sounded twenty-five.”
“But you don’t know, do you?”
“No, I don’t and I won’t. But if she was that age then, she’d be forty, around that, now, wouldn’t she?”
“When was this?”
“I said about fifteen, could be sixteen years ago.”
“Twenty-five and fifteen is forty, yes. She could be forty now,” Harry said. “She could have been a bum. Did you ever think of that?”
“Harry, Harry, Harry, you don’t get it at all! She couldn’t have been a bum. A bum wouldn’t have to live in such a bad room. I wanted to know her only because we were two people both having it tough together, and still and all we weren’t together except when I said ‘Gesundheit.’”
Harry finished his drink and said pleasantly, “No, I don’t mean it. I don’t think she could have been a bum. Anyway, she would be about forty now, all right.”
Eddie finished his drink and beckoned to the barkeep, who came and poured soda into the glasses. Eddie put in the whiskey, and when he put down the bottle he looked expectantly at it for a minute or two.
“And the guy would be about my own age now, about forty-nine or so, wouldn’t he?” Eddie asked.
“Excuse me, but what guy?” Harry asked. “Oh, yeh, yeh, the guy.”
“The one I’d like to take to Christmas dinner with her to the best place in town. Take the two of them. I’ve got a few bucks these days. I pulled through the furnished rooms all right, didn’t I? I was thinking that, coming up the Avenue when the lights were going on.”
Among the more horrid ideas that turned up during the week was one emanating from an insurance company. Wouldn’t we like, the company wanted to know, to continue our Christmas Greeting to somebody for twenty years after we had “passed over”? Passed, not out, mind you, but over. Then followed details of a plan by which, every December for twenty years after we had Passed Over, a twenty-dollar bill would be mailed, with our season’s greetings, to anyone we specified. Can’t you see the happy scene when the postman arrives with the familiar December letter, from which drops the twenty-dollar bill and the season’s greetings from the grave? Can’t you hear the beneficiary announcing the jolly news to the rest of the household: “Look, folks, the old ghost is at it again!”
—PRESTON SHROYER AND
E. B. WHITE, 1931
“You’re rambling, chum. Who is this feller, or maybe who was he?” Harry asked.
“It’s ‘who was he?’ I don’t know where he is, or is he dead or alive. I never saw his face. He was the soldier who picked me up in France. He picked me up off the ground, in the pitch dark, and he didn’t have to.”
“In the war?”
“Sure, in the war. Not this one, the other. But I bet it’s happening too in this one.”
“When you got hit, you mean?” Harry asked.
“That’s the time, of course. You know how I hate professional ex-soldiers, guys always talking the other war. I don’t want to be one of those.”
“Oh, I know that, Eddie, I know it. But I know you were in the other one and got hit.”
“It wasn’t getting hit. That wasn’t so much. It’s this feller I often thought about at odd times all these years. Just to boil it down, it certainly was dark as hell, and there was no shooting going on at all. The first sergeant, guy named Baker, was with me. He got killed, I found out later. He stopped the big pieces of this shell. I only got the little pieces. We were going back through this town, going to find a place to sleep.”
“A little French town?” Harry asked.
“What else? This was in France, for God’s sake, so it was a little French town. Anyway, they suddenly threw one over and it hit right where we were, because the next thing I was pawing the wall of the house we were walking alongside of. I was trying to get up and my legs felt like ropes under me. When I went to stand up, they coiled.”
“You were hit, all right,” Harry said. “I saw your legs in swimming many a time, the marks on them.”
“Oh, I don’t care about that. The point is, this feller. I come to, there in the pitch dark, and somebody was prodding me with his foot. And whoever it was, he was saying, ‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ I answered him. I said, ‘My goddam legs.’”
“It was this guy, you mean?”
“Yes, him,” Eddie said. “And then I passed out again. Well, I never saw the guy. I never saw his face. He could be black or white. He could be an angel, for all I know to this day. Anyway, he’s who carried me through that pitch dark, and he didn’t have to. He could have left me there. And I must have been bleeding like hell. Next thing, I came to, and I was lying on a table. It was an aid station in a cellar someplace. A doc was pouring ether by the canful over holes in my leg. That ether turns cold as hell if you pour it on anything. The guy wasn’t around. Anyway, I didn’t think of him then. Who the hell was he? I don’t know. If it wasn’t for that feller I never saw, I wouldn’t be here today.”
“It’s a pretty good day to be here,” Harry said.
Eddie took a drink and so did Harry. “That’s the two of them—the ones I’d like to take to dinner when it comes to be Christmas night. But I won’t.”
“No, you won’t,” said Harry. “There’s nothing coming out of the bottle but Scotch.”
1944
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 fr
om 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.”
“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.