Christmas at The New Yorker

by New Yorker

  “I’m sorry, friends,” said the conductor. “It’s against the rules. We can’t have that tree in here.”

  “Damn the rules,” someone said. The protests sounded angrier and the conductor might have found himself in a difficult situation if the gentleman, refusing to take advantage of his support, had not said mildly, “Very well,” picked up the tree, and started out with it.

  The tree was deposited on the station platform, the conductor vanished toward the rear of the train, and the gentleman came back into the coach, dropped into a seat next to a window, and began to stare moodily at the hat of the man in front of him. It seemed that the incident was closed. But no. In a moment the owner of the tree raised his voice. “I’ve got a Christmas tree out there they won’t let me ride in the train. Anybody want to buy a Christmas tree you can’t bring in a train?”

  “What do you want for it?” called a brown felt.

  “Wha’m I bid?”

  “Ten cents.”

  “Fifteen,” offered a derby.

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “I’ll give you fifty,” cried the brown felt.

  “Yours for fifty cents, f.o.b. Hoboken.”

  “Bring it aboard.”

  “Can’t do that. Not allowed,” said the tree’s late owner.

  “Oh, it’s not allowed, eh?” said the new owner. “That certainly is just too bad.” He left the car and returned with the tree as the train started. He had two or three assistants—those who had spoken loudest against the conductor. Between them they set the tree up in the aisle directly beneath one of the lights, which it was not quite tall enough to touch.

  Under the glare its forlornness was fully evident. The purchaser seemed not very proud of his bargain; he stood looking at it in a discouraged sort of way. “What about this tree, anyway?” he said. “What do you call it? Has it got a name?”

  The vendor made no answer. He had gone to sleep.

  “No, I suppose it hasn’t got a name. What good would a name do it anyway? What this tree needs is tinsel,” said the new owner. He looked at the bundles in the baggage racks up and down the car. “Must be some tinsel in all those bundles. Who’ll give some tinsel for our little tree?”

  There was no doubt that he had the attention and sympathy of the car; everybody was listening, but no one made a move to produce tinsel. However, the man in the derby, who had bid for the tree, began to tear his newspaper into strips lengthwise. He passed a handful of these strips to the owner of the tree. “Here’s tinsel,” he said. The pair of them set about strewing the scrawny branches with tatters of newsprint. The notion caught on. Half the papers in the car were being torn up and trimmers began to crowd around the tree.

  In the midst of this ceremony, the conductor came back through the car. He hesitated by the tree as if uncertain about interfering again. The man in the derby touched his elbow. “It’s all right, conductor,” he said. “Look here.” He pulled out a wallet and showed the conductor something inside the flap.

  The conductor grinned. “Oh, certainly it’s all right, sir,” he said. “Go right ahead.” It mattered little to him, I imagine, whether the man in the derby really identified himself as someone of authority or merely showed a driving licence, so long as his own face was saved. He passed on through the car.

  JOKE

  Heigh-Ho, we never thought we’d live to see the day when we thought a practical joke was funny, but we do see a certain gleam of entertainment in something that happened to a Mr. Noble. Mr. Noble’s friends ganged up on him and inserted an advertisement, a couple of days after Christmas, in the classified section of the American: “We buy old Christmas trees, high prices paid. Call C. H. Noble, Tompkins Square 6-4410 after 6 P.M.” The ad ran two days. The first day the switchboard in Mr. Noble’s apartment house received exactly fifty-seven calls from hopeful householders, dealers, and superintendents of apartment houses. The second evening there were eighty-eight calls, including one from a man who wanted to help Mr. Noble collect old trees in Philadelphia, and one from a railway agent who had a carload lot to dispose of. When people started to arrive in taxicabs with old, shedding trees, Mr. Noble went out and hid in the corner bar-and-grill. He still doesn’t know what the people thought he was going to do with old Christmas trees. We don’t know, either.

  —CHARLES NOBLE AND

  RUSSELL MALONEY, 1937

  The laxness (if it was laxness) of the conductor allowed him to escape antagonism, but the performance of the brakeman won positive applause. The brakeman appeared when the tree was already overloaded; he carried a bunch of those colored slips which, if you’re not careful, they stick in your hatband. These he had strung together on a bit of twine. Advancing down the aisle, he placed his offering upon the tree and without saying a word retired. At the door he paused and bowed. “Merry Christmas from the Lackawanna Railroad,” he said.

  It was tacitly admitted that the brakeman’s offering completed the trimming of the tree. Nothing more could be added. But the conviviality which the tree had fostered was at flood tide. “How about us giving a Merry Christmas to the Lackawanna?” someone shouted. “No hard feelings toward anyone on Christmas Eve. Come on, boys, let’s sing.” And they sang, one or two at first, raggedly, but soon a full chorus:

  Merry Christmas to you,

  Merry Christmas to you,

  Merry Christmas, Lackawanna,

  Merry Christmas to you.

  After that it was only a question of choosing other songs. Some wag started “We Won’t Get Home Until Morning” and was hushed. Another hit the popular fancy with “Jingle Bells.” Thereafter they worked at the standard Christmas repertoire, whether or not they knew the words—“O Come, All Ye Faithful, la-la la-la laaa-la,” “Silent Night,” and the rest.

  The tree dominated the car. Fully half the passengers were gathered about it and most of the rest had folded their papers and sat leaning over seat backs, singing or at least attending to what went on. Only three or four rockbound spirits continued determinedly to read the day’s news.

  The party was in full swing when the conductor made his last appearance. “Springwood!” he called this time. “Springwood!” The cry set a long chain of reflexes in motion. One, two, ten, twenty dropped away from the tree; there was a wild flapping of overcoats being donned and bundles descending from the baggage racks. Hatted, coated, and laden, they were lined up at the doors long before the train stopped, as the commuter’s custom is.

  Last to leave the car, I glanced back and saw the tree abandoned in a loneliness of green plush and glaring light and torn newspapers.

  Outside, the travellers by the six-seventeen were marching along the platform and up the stairs to the street level, each, as usual, wrapped tight in his own habit, unseeing and unaware of any mortal in the crowd around.

  1939

  TREE

  For some years, we have been among the many thousands of people who have gone to the Metropolitan Museum at the Christmas season to see a dazzling tree ornamented with eighteenth-century Neapolitan baroque angels, cherubs, and Nativity figures. This year, we decided to get there early to watch the tree being decorated, in the Medieval Sculpture Hall, and to talk with the person who gave the handsome ornaments to the Museum—Loretta Hines Howard. When we arrived, we found that ten large screens had been set up around the tree to conceal the work area from the public. Only the upper half of the tree was visible, and it was covered with angels, stars, and electric candles. Near the very top, about eighteen feet above the floor, Mrs. Howard was perched on an aluminum ladder, finagling a candle into its proper position on a bough. We slipped through a space between the screens and went inside.

  All was chaos. Pieces of papier-mâché desert scenery, for the crèche, were lying here and there on sawhorses, cherubs were resting at random on cartons and tables, and electric cables lay in coils and loops on the floor. We looked at the tree—an artificial one, which stands twenty feet high on a red platform three feet
high. To our surprise, the bottom half of the tree was utterly nude, consisting merely of a square green trunk. Around the trunk, angels danced in midair, suspended from vertical wires fastened to the platform. Mrs. Howard descended the ladder and greeted us. “Three-ring circus,” she said, gazing about at the disarray. “We’ve been working for five weeks—two electricians; my assistant, Enrique Espinoza, over there; and myself. We use an artificial tree because of fire regulations. The whole process of ornamenting it is extremely complicated. I’m trying to simplify it, because I don’t expect to live forever. I’m sixty-five, and when I’m gone the Metropolitan staff will have to do it all.” Mrs. Howard, who has fluffy white hair and a peppery, no-nonsense demeanor, was wearing a rumpled blue denim smock, rumpled bluejeans, black moccasins, and bifocals with light-blue frames. Removing the bifocals, she held them about fifteen inches away and examined them. “Dirty,” she said. “Can’t see a thing.”

  As she polished them, we asked her where the limbs of the lower half of the tree were. “Over here,” she said, leaping around several stacked cartons and digging into a large box in a corner. We followed her, and she handed us a long green bough with a metal hook at one end. “That end goes into the trunk,” she said. “The boughs are made of wire and dyed bristles. They look like an explosion of green baby-bottle brushes, don’t they?”

  We asked Mrs. Howard if she had any favorites among the collection of a hundred and forty Neapolitan figures that she gave to the Metropolitan in 1964.

  “I love them all,” she said. “I could no more have a favorite than I could have a favorite child. I have, incidentally, four children, nineteen grandchildren, one great-grandchild, and another on the way. My husband, Howell H. Howard, died playing polo at Meadow Brook in 1937. He was a paper manufacturer. His father had a famous horse called Stagehand, who once beat Seabiscuit in the Santa Anita Handicap. That was interesting, not only because Seabiscuit was hard to beat but because Seabiscuit was owned by a man who was also named Howard—C. S. Howard. No relation to us.”

  Mrs. Howard dashed away to help Mr. Espinoza untangle a nest of electric cords, and we picked up a book lying nearby—a recently published picture book about Mrs. Howard’s collection, with a commentary written by Olga Raggio, a Metropolitan curator of Western European Arts. Leafing through it, we learned that the collection combines two Christmas traditions of ancient origin: the crèche and the German custom of the adorned tree. Both date from the sixteenth century in the forms in which we see them throughout the world today, but their origins are much older. In the Middle Ages, trees were hung with red apples as a symbol of the story of Adam and Eve and the tree in the Garden of Eden. The crèche, as a visual representation of the birth of Christ, can be traced to Nativity scenes on sarcophagi as early as the fourth century. Most of Mrs. Howard’s figures came from a famous collection that belonged to the Catello family of Naples. Ranging in height from twelve to fifteen inches, they are quite flexible and can be bent into a variety of positions. Their bodies are made of fibre and wire, their limbs are of excellently carved wood, and their heads and shoulders are sculptured in terra-cotta. Their faces have a variety of exceedingly lifelike expressions, from serene half smiles on the angels’ faces to startled gapes on the shepherds’. Most of them are still wearing their eighteenth-century cloth costumes.

  Mrs. Howard whizzed by, and we asked her how she had become a collector. “In 1925, the year I was married, my mother gave me a Christmas present of three figures—Mary, Joseph, and the Infant—which she found in Marshall Field’s, the Chicago department store. I’m originally from Chicago; my father was in lumber. Over the years, I collected more and more. One day, Henry Francis Taylor, who used to be the director of the Metropolitan, told me about the great Catello collection, and I began to correspond with the Catello family. It took me three years of correspondence to buy the pieces I wanted; I had to get them to bring down the price. Still I had never met the Catellos, so one day, during a visit to Italy, I went to call on Mr. Catello. Everybody was in mourning. He had died. I asked them what he had died of. They said of joy. They were quite serious. It seems that he had gone to Paris because he had heard that José Maria Sert, the painter, had a marvellous collection of crèche figures there. But Sert had died, and his widow had died, and Mr. Catello had to search everywhere for the collection. He finally found it in a warehouse. He looked at it, bought it, and expired of joy.”

  —CONSTANCE FEELEY, 1969

  TOKIO CHRISTMAS

  MAX HILL

  The day of Pearl Harbor, I was given a number, No. 867, and put away in a five-and-a-half-by-nine-foot cell in Sugamo Prison, which the Japanese blandly describe as the Tokio Kochisho, or Tokio Retaining Place. In May, at which time I was still in Sugamo, I was tried and found guilty of sending to the Associated Press, in my capacity as correspondent, stories which, according to the very flattering judge, were “detrimental to Japan’s diplomacy.” I was sentenced to serve eighteen months, but the sentence was suspended when the United States government insisted that all correspondents be included in the first exchange of nationals, and actually I got out of Sugamo in June, when I was removed to the comparative freedom of an internment camp and then shipped off to New York on the Gripsholm, so my total stay there was six months. Six months in a Tokio retaining place can be tedious.

  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 goldtoothed 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.

  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?”

  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.