Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  “And for you, Tommy, you can take my coat, but I’ll want it back.” Mr. Wolfe draped the heavy fur from Tommy’s shoulders. “You look like a little king.” Tommy sank under its weight. “That’s what happens to bad raccoons,” he said with another laugh. “We make coats out of them.”

  Tommy’s mother laughed, too. “It’s a good thing you’re not a raccoon, darling,” she said, lifting the coat from his shoulders, admiring it. “Why, look,” she said, “they’ve even put their little tails on the pockets! Lucien, you’re the only man I know who could get away with such a thing.”

  “Ooops. Almost forgot. Open your hand, Tommy,” Mr. Wolfe said, “and close your eyes.” Tommy did, squeezing his eyes tight shut. He felt Mr. Wolfe drop something large and round and cold in his palm and squeeze his fingers around it, and then he said, “Okay, open up.” There in his hand was a silver dollar—a Canadian silver dollar, Tommy saw when he looked at it closely, with the head of the king on it and the year, 1938. “Fresh out of the mint,” Mr. Wolfe said, “the last coin of the old year, and made from my own silver, too.” Tommy had never had a silver dollar before. “Keep it clean,” Mr. Wolfe said with another laugh, and patted Tommy on the shoulder.

  “Why, Lucien, isn’t that lovely,” Tommy’s mother said, picking it from his hand. “And made from your own silver! Isn’t that nice, Tommy?”

  “Yes,” Tommy said, “it is. I’ve never had one before.”

  “Thank Mr. Wolfe, Tommy,” his mother said, reminding him of his manners.

  “Thank you, Mr. Wolfe. Thank you very much,” and Tommy looked at the dollar again, turning it over in his palm before slipping it into his pocket.

  Tommy’s father returned from the kitchen with a tray of drinks. Tommy supposed that to be polite he’d had to make them from Mr. Wolfe’s whisky, which Tommy knew he didn’t like as much as Scotch. Maybe he made his own drink with Scotch; nobody would ever know. He thanked Mr. Wolfe for the whisky. “It’s the best,” he said, and when Tommy showed it to him, he admired the silver dollar, too. “Hold on to it,” he told Tommy. “We might need it.”

  Because it was Christmas Eve, Tommy’s mother gave him an eggnog with nutmeg on top but no whisky in it, even though it was known that eggnogs definitely spoiled your appetite and were more appropriate for dessert. While they were all talking and catching up on Mr. Wolfe’s news, David said he was going to see Margie, and John went off to Emily’s. The girls were making them go to church at midnight; Tommy’s parents weren’t going this year because Rose was off and no one would be in the house to stay with Tommy and he wasn’t old enough to go with them. Tommy was disappointed that his brothers left, and a little disappointed that Mr. Wolfe had shown up so unexpectedly, too. Tommy had hoped that the family could be together, and that his mother would make popcorn after supper and play the Christmas carols that they would all stand around the piano and sing—even his father, in the monotone he sometimes joked about. “Some men—and Mrs. Steer, of course—are baritones,” he told Mrs. Sedgwick. “I’m a monotone.” Then his mother would turn out all the lights but those on the tree and bring him close to her on the couch and he would snuggle up in her warmth and softness while she read “The Night Before Christmas.” That wouldn’t happen now. Probably his brothers were too old for “The Night Before Christmas” anyway, and they wouldn’t have stayed home for it. Tommy could feel the silver dollar in his pocket.

  They had oyster stew for supper. It was always supper on Christmas Eve, and always oyster stew, too. That was a custom that his mother’s family had brought all the way from New England and that his mother faithfully observed. See, Tommy thought, she did have some customs that she kept. Really she had a lot of customs that she kept, like the tinsel and the holly wreaths.

  After Tommy had finished his oyster stew and taken care to leave all the oysters in the bottom of the dish and conceal them as best he could, after he’d hung his stocking by the chimney just like the children in the poem his mother didn’t read this year, Tommy left the three of them alone downstairs. “You’ve had a lot of excitement for one day,” his mother said, sending him off much later than usual because it was Christmas Eve. A few minutes later she came up to tuck him in snug, kissing him good night and singing “Silent Night” while he watched her in the shadows. When he reminded her, she raised his blinds so he could look out at the blue lights twinkling in the cold clear night. He didn’t want her to leave, but she couldn’t read him a story because she had to get the house ready for Santa, and of course she had to be nice to Mr. Wolfe. “Let Daddy talk to Mr. Wolfe,” Tommy told her, but no, that wasn’t possible, and after another verse of “Silent Night” and a final kiss she left his room to join the two men downstairs. When she had gone, Tommy put the silver dollar on his windowsill. He could see it shining from his bed.

  Though it was long past his regular bedtime, Tommy tried to stay awake, hoping to hear his mother bring down the gifts from their hiding places in the attic and in his grandmother’s bedroom where she had wrapped them, but she and his father and Mr. Wolfe went on laughing and talking for a very long time. Tommy wondered what was happening at the Steers’, where they had their big Christmas dinner and opened their gifts on Christmas Eve, the custom in Denmark. He wondered why Mr. Wolfe didn’t go to the Steers’ instead; after all, he knew them, too. Mrs. Steer thought Mr. Wolfe was very sophisticated, very dashing, and very dangerous—“a real Lord Byron,” she said, and explained when Tommy asked her that Lord Byron was an English poet, one of the great Romantics. “Maid of Athens, ere we part, Give, o, give me back my heart! Or, since that has left my breast, Keep it now and take the rest!” That, she said, is a great Romantic—“and a great rogue, too.” Tommy wasn’t sure what to make of that, or what Mrs. Steer made of it either. In some ways Mr. Wolfe reminded Tommy of his Uncle Andrew, whom he liked a lot. Mr. Wolfe spent a lot of time in the Canadian woods looking at mining claims which sometimes made him a lot of money and sometimes lost him a lot, too, but he was not a prospector like the grizzled old man who came to the door every few months to see Tommy’s father. Not at all. Lucien Wolfe—funny name—was entirely different. Tommy’s father didn’t give him money, for one thing, and he wasn’t grizzled and dirty but looked like everyone else, only better. He was thinner—“Lucien’s slim,” was how Tommy’s mother described him—and he had thick black hair and a mustache like Tommy’s Uncle Roger’s, and he spent so much time outdoors that even in the winter he was tanned. No one really knew when he might turn up in Grande Rivière. He usually spent some time on the Island, and he kept an apartment in the old McNaughton Mansion that he hardly ever used. Sometimes his business kept him away for a year at a time. It took him all over the North—he had been to Alaska, the Yukon, and the Klondike—and to places like Mexico, too, where he spoke Spanish and took pictures of the Gila monster, which he explained was a poisonous lizard; if it bit you, you were dead. Mr. Wolfe took a lot of pictures of animals, and a lot of the animals were dangerous. He had shown a movie on the Island the summer before, about bears in the North. The bears were funny, they looked like big clumsy toys—like his own ragged Teddy bear that he had put in a shoe box and buried near the Indian cemetery on the Island that summer, only a hundred times larger—but they were ferocious, Mr. Wolfe said. They didn’t look it; they looked friendly, as if you could play with them. You’d better not, though. They could rip you apart with their claws, and sometimes they did. Mr. Wolfe said the difference between a grizzly and a brown bear was that the grizzly would climb a tree right after you while the brown bear, who couldn’t climb, would shake you out of it. Either way you were in trouble. If you’d been near a salmon, the Kodiak bear would eat you right up because he could smell the salmon on you and salmon was his favorite food. Some of Mr. Wolfe’s pictures were so good that they were printed in National Geographic, even though he was only an amateur photographer. No, Mr. Wolfe didn’t work the way other men worked. He said he couldn’t, that he’d rather be broke with the chance of
hitting the jackpot once in a while than go to work in an office every day and play golf on the weekends, even in the evenings, as Tommy’s father often did. Mr. Wolfe had to be his own man, people said. Tommy figured that was probably why he’d never married, so far as anyone knew. Daisy Meyer knew a lot, and she said that nobody could catch him. “He moves too fast.” Maybe that was why Mrs. Steer called him a great Romantic. This Christmas, Mr. Wolfe must have hit the jackpot, Tommy thought, or else he wouldn’t have brought a case of whisky to his father and that big plant to his mother. Tommy wondered, if Mr. Wolfe had children, would he have brought them fur coats, like his mother’s father? Then they could have sold them when they were poor, too. Margie Slade had had a fur coat when she was little; it was white, and Tommy had seen a picture of her wearing it. He was very glad—very, very glad—that nobody had ever brought him a fur coat and made him wear it. It was all right for his mother, and all right, he supposed, for Mr. Wolfe, too, the only man he’d ever seen in a fur coat. His mother’s coat was sealskin, but there weren’t any tails on it. Margie’s was made of Persian lamb. Probably everyone who had a fur coat was wearing it tonight, it was so cold and clear. The lights catching the crystals of frost in the corner of his bedroom window made it seem even colder. High against the sky he could see the orange glow from the furnaces in his father’s plant. The furnaces burned day and night, summer and winter, year in, year out; the fires could never go out. He heard the dull grinding of his own furnace. The new furnace burned oil, and nobody ever had to tend it the way the old coal furnace had to be tended, the way the furnaces in his father’s plant could never be left alone. Tommy snuggled farther down in his bed, watching the motes of blue light sparkle from the trees on his roof, in the frost on his window, in the silver dollar on his sill. He closed his eyes tight to see the points of light popping against his eyelids like tiny fireworks, and snapped them open to see the lights still twinkling on the trees, cold and sharp, and the reflection of the fires at the plant shimmering in the distant sky. The blue lights sparkled like the amethyst his mother had once worn as a pendant until the hook broke and ever since Tommy could remember had lain in the jumble at the bottom of her jewelry drawer. Sometimes Tommy put the amethyst to his eye, trying to make it stick there like a monocle, turning it and watching the familiar objects of his world break up in the flashing blades of colored light, displaced but not distorted. Finally, against his wishes and his better judgment, Tommy drifted into nervous sleep, hearing in his mind his mother at the piano and thinking not so much about sugarplums—whatever they were—but of what he might find under the tree in the morning. He did not hear his mother carry the packages down from their secret places.

  The first thing Tommy saw when he rushed around the bend in the stairway Christmas morning, before anyone else in the house had awakened, was a desk just his size with a top that rolled down, two drawers—one of them with a key in its lock—and a chair that matched. He did not know whether to laugh or to cry, he was so thrilled, so happy, so full of gratitude. He paused there on the landing for a second, gazing at the desk and at the packages that surrounded it and spilled out from underneath the tree, spreading to the piano and beyond. The room in its winter light seemed filled with beautiful boxes of all sizes and shapes, and before it all his desk, his own most splendid desk. Tommy ran back upstairs shouting “Up! Up! Everybody up! It’s Christmas. It’s Christmas! Merry Christmas, everybody,” and he threw open his brothers’ doors and shook them, and opened, a little more carefully, his parents’. His mother, already awake, reached over to hug him and give him a kiss. “I love it! I love it!” Tommy shouted, throwing his arms around her. He couldn’t stand still, and he ran around to his father’s side of the bed and gave him a hug, too—“You’re awake,” Tommy said, surprised, and his father laughed and said if he weren’t he’d have to be deaf, and hugged him back—and Tommy danced around the room and back out the door and down the stairs. His father called after him, “It’s just like the desks at the plant, Tommy, just like the desk you like to sit at in my office.” Well, it wasn’t quite like that but it was close enough, and Tommy shouted back, “Joy to the world, my desk is come!” His very own desk. With a drawer that locked. His very own private place that he would never let David into, except that he might open it just long enough for him to see treasures there but not long enough for him to see what the treasures were before Tommy would slam the drawer shut, lock it, slip the key into his pocket, and move on. Ha, but David would be furious! At least, Tommy hoped David would be furious, and he was eager to try it on him but he’d have to wait for the right moment.

  The desk was too big to wrap, of course, but his mother had tied a bow to the back of the chair and put three Christmas balls on top of it with a sprig of balsam—the balsam might have been David’s idea, Tommy thought. He sat down in the chair and rolled back the top—it did disappear into the back of the desk just like those at his father’s office—and inside were five pigeonholes and still another very small drawer, though this one didn’t lock. It took a while for Tommy to begin to notice the pile of gifts that stretched out around him and around his beautiful, almost grown-up desk, now his most prized possession.

  His mother, having stopped to admire his desk and the tree and to give Tommy another little hug, was already in the kitchen making coffee, and his father was coming downstairs in his bathrobe. David, who was dressed, started the fire in the fireplace and plugged in the lights on the tree, and John was on the telephone calling Emily to wish her a Merry Christmas.

  “Can’t that wait for a minute, John?” his father asked. But Tommy didn’t care. John could talk to Emily as long as he wanted, if Tommy could play at his desk. Tommy’s father took his cup of coffee upstairs and came down a few minutes later, dressed, and made John get off the telephone. Tommy’s father didn’t like anyone to talk on the telephone for long because he might get an important call from the plant. They had their orange juice and David helped his mother with breakfast, which they took into the living room and ate as they opened their gifts. Tommy ate at his desk, and when he opened a gift he would take the card and put it into the drawer that locked. When he opened a little box with a pair of dice in it from David, he put that in there, too. He wanted to learn to shoot craps with them—maybe David would teach him; he knew how.

  Tommy was glad it was just the family here this Christmas so they didn’t have to sit at the dining-room table and finish breakfast before any of the gifts were opened, the way they’d done two Christmases ago when they’d visited his Aunt Clara and Uncle Andrew in Chicago. His Aunt Clara had so many rules. One of his mother’s rules, which she sometimes allowed Tommy to break, was that gifts were opened one at a time so that each of them could see and admire one another’s presents. There were a lot of them—the unwrapping took most of the morning and the floor was soon a jumble of ribbons and wrapping and boxes—not only from his parents and his brothers but also from his aunts and uncles, whose packages had been arriving at the house for the past few weeks and immediately whisked out of sight by his mother, though Tommy knew where she had hidden them: in his grandmother’s bedroom closet, under her bed, and in the attic. He had looked at all the cards and poked and shaken each box, so that he knew from the wrapping which was whose, but he’d never found the desk. His mother must have hidden it under the dark eaves in the attic, which was a place Tommy didn’t like to explore alone. Everyone in his mother’s and father’s families gave everyone else gifts. Well, they didn’t get anything from his Uncle Archie and Aunt Pat, or from his Aunt Louise and Uncle Arthur, either, but that was different. His mother gave them things, though. Soon the telephone would be ringing and they would be putting in calls to Chicago and Arizona and Grosse Pointe and Minneapolis or wherever his relations were. Sometimes it took a long time to get the calls through, and it was sort of a race to see who got through first, his aunts and uncles or his parents. Tommy was happy, and happy that everyone else seemed happy, too, even his father, who always got
fewer gifts than anyone else. That was because he was a man and harder to buy for, his mother explained, though Tommy thought when he was a man he’d be pretty easy to buy for. He loved presents; he loved the wrapping and the unwrapping, and the ribbons and the tissue and the beautiful paper on his aunts’ and uncles’ gifts, and the boxes with the names of city stores written on them: Marshall Field’s, B. Altman, Hudson’s, Saks Fifth Avenue.

  “Ha, ha, David,” Tommy said, “I bet you’d like to know what’s in my drawer now.”

  “Would I ever,” David said, suddenly lunging for the desk and tugging at the knob.

  “It’s locked,” Tommy said. The key was in his bathrobe pocket. He thought he’d said it very suavely.

  “No need to shriek,” his father said, “David’s right here in the room.”

  “Let me see,” said David, “you’ve got a rubber toad, seventeen yards of ribbon, all your gift cards, and two little dice.” Except for the rubber toad, which David had just made up, he was almost right. That is, there was a lot of ribbon in the drawer and all his gift cards, and the dice David had given him; but there were some other things, too, and Tommy wasn’t telling what.

  “Wrong,” he shouted, triumphant. “Double wrong! Let’s play Fifty-two Pickup. My deal.” And he unlocked the drawer to flash before David’s eyes the deck of cards John had given him.

  “Finish your cereal, Tommy,” his mother said. “And David, stop teasing. No Fifty-two Pickup today. We’re going to pick up all this paper instead.” His mother always saved the prettiest paper and the best ribbons to use again another year, like the tinsel on the tree. The excelsior and the discarded wrappings were burned in the fireplace. The glasses for drinks that his father always got were packed in excelsior. Sometimes they were highball glasses, sometimes old-fashioned glasses, and sometimes cocktail glasses. His father had a lot of glasses.