Christmas at The New Yorker

by New Yorker

  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.

  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.

  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, al
though 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.

  “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.

  Hearing the paper crackle in Wilf’s hands, Father Urban turned around—just too late, he thought, to catch Wilf observing him. Father Urban stood up. “I don’t think that’s funny,” he said. Jack looked up from the checkers. Brother Harold, at the dining-room table, glanced up from his work. “The bambino isn’t in the crib,” Father Urban explained.

  Jack came over to the tree and got down on all fours. He started to put his hand inside the crib.

  “Look out!” Father Urban said—barely in time, for Jack had his hand in the way of the moving animals and shepherds. “You can see he’s not there. You don’t have to go poking around. He’s just not there—and I want to know why.”

  Brother Harold bent to his work. Wilf rattled his paper, taking a fresh grip on it, and settled deeper in his chair. He sent a message over the wall to them: “He’s not born yet!”

  Father Urban had anticipated this answer, and was not amused. Nor, apparently, was Jack. Stiff in his joints, he was slowly rising from the floor, rearing up the last few inches to more than his full height, then settling down to it. He made his way back to his chair and checkers. He looked worried, as well he might; Jack hated trouble.

  Father Urban stood his ground, by the tree. “All right, Father,” he said. “You’ve made your point.” His tone was threatening—the undisguised, true voice of his feelings.

  Wilf was silent and invisible. Father Urban wavered. Should he make a stand? “It’s my crib,” he could say. Or should he go off to bed? He glanced at Jack, who was staring down at the checkers. Why didn’t Jack say something? Jack was chicken. Father Urban glanced over at Brother Harold. He felt that Brother Harold was against him.

  He went to his chair and sat down. He now knew what he had to do—nothing. It wasn’t necessary to make a stand or to go off in a huff. He had Wilf where he wanted him. As long as the situation remained unchanged, each passing moment would redound to Father Urban’s credit and to Wilf’s shame. It was Wilf’s move.

  But it was Father Urban’s move in the other game—the one he was playing with Jack—and he made it: a bad one. Jack, of course, showed him no mercy. Father Urban sniffed. He wondered if Jack’s whole personality might not have been different—aggressive—if checkers had not become his only accomplishment. Jack certainly got back at the world in checkers.

  Something was coming over the wall: “Hospital nun I once knew in Omaha, she used to take all the baby Jesuses out of the cribs. You know—every floor had its tree and crib. She put them all back on Christmas morning.”

  Not good enough, Wilf, thought Father Urban, holding to his strategy of silence. He had Jack guessing, too. Jack still expected him to fly off the handle. Jack’s right leg had stopped vibrating.

  More was coming over the wall: “It focussed people’s attention on the rea
l significance of Christmas. The idea of waiting, if you know what I mean.”

  Jack dutifully faced the wall while Wilf spoke, but he didn’t comment. Father Urban’s eyes were on the checkers.

  “It’s still Advent,” Wilf murmured, turning a page.

  Father Urban sensed that Wilf, turning the page, had stolen a look at him. Jack cleared his throat and, in a tone even more timid than was customary with him, said, “I see what you mean, Father, and I grant there’s a lot in what you say. But I’ve been wondering if the shepherds themselves should be present yet. Or even Mary and Joseph. In the attitudes we see them in, I mean. And the Three Kings. The animals—yes, they would be there, of course. Not running around in circles, though, as they are in this particular crib.”

  “He’s right!” Wilf cried.

  He had thrown down the paper and was on his feet; he was confessing the error as his, but not all his. He offered no apology to Father Urban, and thereby indicted him—made it appear that, on the authority of Jack’s sound doctrine, they had both been wrong, and that he, at least, was ready to admit it. That was the impression Wilf was giving, and it infuriated Father Urban. He had come a long, long way. He who had preached to the world, and, you might say, won, now contended with fools in the wilderness, and lost. What star had led him to this?

  He watched Wilf go over to the crib, not sure what the man would do next but determined to stop him if he laid a finger on the other figures. When this happened, Father Urban would make the stand he should have made earlier. Wilf, however, was taking the bambino out of his pocket. He disconnected the crib, knelt, and extended his hand to put the bambino back in the simulated straw.

  This was the moment, the move, that Father Urban had been waiting for. “Thanks” was all he’d say. “Thanks” said as Father Urban could say it would be enough to show that he considered that Wilf had bowed to him. Doubtless Jack expected Father Urban to do something of the sort.