Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  “Oh, you can find such wonderful things in the city, such beautiful wrapping,” his mother said, pressing out with her hands the paper that his Aunt Elizabeth had wrapped her gifts in. You had to be careful of her packages because his aunt pinned the paper to the box instead of taping it, and the bows were always pinned to the paper. Inside, her boxes were full of pins, too, and the sweater she had given Tommy and the blouse she had given his mother were stuck with pins that you couldn’t see so you were always getting pricked when you didn’t expect it. His mother just used colored tape or ribbons, but his mother wasn’t really very good at wrapping presents. “It’s the thought that counts,” she always said, “not the gift or the wrapping,” which was why Tommy got to make his own gifts. “People like them even more if you make them yourself,” his mother said. “It’s like giving away a part of you.” Tommy didn’t think of it like that, but this year he gave everybody boxes of matches that he’d decorated with pictures from old Christmas cards. Mrs. Steer had shown him how to do it, and he and Amy had spent two Saturdays before Christmas cutting out pictures from the Steers’ old cards and gluing them to matchboxes. Tommy would get a little bundle of six boxes and wrap them together and tie them with a paper ribbon that he tried to make curl, and then he hid them at the bottom of his underwear drawer and gave them to everyone in his family and a package to Mrs. Steer, too. His mother was very surprised, and so were his father and his brothers. His mother said they were almost too pretty to use, but she put them around the house next to the ashtrays for their guests. His mother didn’t smoke, but he knew that Mrs. Steer would use hers. She had a double supply, because she had gotten some from Amy, too. Tommy didn’t like to admit it, but Amy’s matchboxes looked nicer than his. You couldn’t see the paste at the edge on Amy’s and she was better at cutting out.

  “Now, Tommy, let’s get some clothes on,” his mother said. She was still in her robe, too. “Someone might be dropping in and we wouldn’t want them to find us like this. You can play with your things as soon as you’re dressed.” They went upstairs together while Tommy’s brothers finished burning the Christmas wrapping and his father went into the kitchen to see about the eggnog in case anyone should come by. Neither his father nor his mother liked eggnog—it wasn’t a proper drink, they said—but they always served it at Christmastime anyway. It was sort of a tradition, Tommy supposed.

  It took Tommy’s mother a lot longer to get dressed than it took Tommy, and when she came down the long stairs she was wearing a dress as red as lipstick with the poinsettia pin she had worn every Christmas for longer than Tommy could remember. Its leaves were long and sharp, and they pricked his face if his mother hugged him. She matched Mr. Wolfe’s plant, Tommy thought. His father had already fixed himself a drink because it was a special occasion—on ordinary occasions he never took a drink until dinnertime, but, as he said, it was almost noon and it was Christmas Day—and when his mother appeared on the stairway his father raised his glass and said, “Here comes the scarlet woman.” His mother looked startled. “Oops,” his father said, “I meant, ‘Here comes the bride,’” and Tommy began singing, “Here comes the bride, short, fat, and wide,” and his brothers laughed, and his mother, who liked her red Christmas dress and her poinsettia pin and also worried about getting fat, said, “Sometimes you boys are too much. What was it Queen Victoria said? Oh, yes. ‘We are not amused.’” But his father was, and he gave her a little pat and said, “There’s the old sweetheart,” and immediately the doorbell was ringing. Sometimes Tommy’s mother and father seemed to know what was going to happen; his mother had said someone might be dropping by, and here they were, Nick Kingsfield—he didn’t want to be called Farnsworth now—and Margie Slade.

  Nick brought flowers for Tommy’s mother—“Oh, Nick, you’re always so thoughtful,” she said, hugging him and catching her pin in his jacket—and for Tommy a little toy car that when you wound it up ran in circles around the room, making a lot of noise and crashing into everything and everybody, and making them jump, which was fun. Tommy saw that his mother didn’t think it was that much fun, though, and after she had given him a couple of looks he picked it up and slipped it into his drawer, which he locked. He loved his drawer that locked.

  Margie brought a gift for each one of them, except for David, but she’d already given him his present the night before. David didn’t show it to anybody, either, or tell anybody what it was, though Tommy begged him to. Tommy never even saw the package. “I’ll bet it was just a kiss,” he said to David, who told him he should be so lucky. “Just a measly kiss,” Tommy repeated. “Ugh.” Once in the car with David and Margie and some of her girl friends, she had said she was going to kiss him, and she tickled him and made him giggle and finally laugh so hard he was afraid he would wet his pants, and she pinned him down so he couldn’t get away and finally planted a big kiss on his ear—“a big wet smooch,” she called it—and left a lipstick mark, too. Tommy didn’t see anything lucky about that, and if that was what she’d given David, and he bet it was, well, David could have it. Probably he stood under the mistletoe so she had to. But what Margie brought Tommy was better than any kiss. It was the finest Monopoly set Tommy had ever seen, and it thrilled him almost as much as the desk. The hotels looked like ivory, not wood like Jimmy Randolph’s, and Tommy knew it must have been expensive. Well, maybe she had given David something exciting; he’d have to find out. Next to the desk, he thought the Monopoly set was his favorite gift, and he loved Margie very much. He was sorry he hadn’t thought to make any matchboxes for her, but she used a lighter anyway. His mother hadn’t gotten anything for her, either, and she was astonished—she said she was astonished—when she unwrapped Margie’s package and pulled out a leather handbag. “What a handsome bag,” she said to Margie, opening it and examining the things inside. She didn’t have any trouble with the clasp. His mother looked up at Margie and repeated, “A very handsome, a very elegant bag. My, won’t I look smart?” His mother was being polite. “You shouldn’t have done it, Margie, but thank you. I love it and I can always use it.” It was curious that women could use so many handbags; his mother had a shelf full of them, some in cloth bags of their own, like his Aunt Clara’s suitcases, which were leather and had their own canvas covers that zipped. The covers kept the leather nice, but you couldn’t see the leather with the covers on them, so nobody would know if it was nice or not. Tommy thought again how glad he was that they weren’t with his aunt this Christmas, though she had sent him a lot of nice gifts. She always sent him more gifts than anyone else, except for his parents. His Uncle Christian sent him a book, as he usually did, and usually Tommy liked it, too. This one was full of strange drawings—in sepia, his mother said—of fish that didn’t look like any fish Tommy had ever seen: fish that lit up, fish that looked like horses, fish that looked like balloons, fish that were poisonous, fish that were friendly, like Fingerfins. The book was called Fingerfins: A Tale of the Sargasso Sea. Fingerfins lived in the seaweed. He couldn’t survive anyplace else, and if he fell away from the seaweed he would die. Tommy thought he’d like to go to the Sargasso Sea, an ocean within an ocean, the book said, with a separate life of its own. How could that be? Tommy wondered if Mr. Wolfe had ever been there, and he thought he might ask him about it, and about how there could be a separate sea within the sea, and how you could know the difference since it was all water, and why it had its own life different from the life of the ocean. Tommy had never seen the ocean, but his parents had and so had his Aunt Clara. They had sent him postcards from Bermuda that his brothers had had to read to him because he didn’t know how to read then. His Aunt Clara and Uncle Andrew had been there again, with his Uncle Christian, which was where he said he had found the book. He wrote that on the card Tommy put in his drawer. That was a long way from his living room in Grande Rivière, Tommy thought. He couldn’t imagine a Christmas without snow, and it didn’t snow in Bermuda. There were palm trees in Bermuda, just like the Christmas cards with the wise men at Bet
hlehem, and Tommy had never seen a palm tree, either. There were a lot of things he would have to see when he was grown.

  Tommy’s mother was admiring the wool shirt that his father had just unwrapped and that Margie had given him. It had pins in it, too, Tommy noticed, and it came from the best department store downtown. He thanked her, of course, but Tommy’s father was funny about gifts. He returned a lot of them, or gave them to the Salvation Army. Those were business gifts that were delivered to the house a week or two before Christmas and came from the companies that did business with Tommy’s father, and they were usually something to eat or drink. Tommy’s mother didn’t think they did any harm—they were delicacies, she said, and expensive—but his father said that it wasn’t right. So he wrote the people and explained that he didn’t accept gifts. It seemed to Tommy that he spent as much time returning those gifts as he did opening the ones under their tree. Mr. Bonnaro’s was the only one he kept. Maybe that was because Mr. Bonnaro brought it to the house himself, or maybe it was because he made it. The gift was always the same: two gallon jugs of wine that his father put in the cellar and never drank but that he thanked Mr. Bonnaro for just the same. Mr. Bonnaro didn’t speak very good English because he was an Italian, but he said he knew how to make good wine. He knew how to grow vegetables, too, and in the summer Tommy’s mother bought vegetables from his garden. Mr. Bonnaro had worked for Tommy’s father for a long time, and his father liked him even if he didn’t like Dago Red, which was what he called Mr. Bonnaro’s wine. His mother didn’t think that was a nice name, but she didn’t think Mr. Bonnaro’s children were nice, either. Two of them were in Tommy’s grade. Carmen was Tommy’s age, and Tommy liked him better than Leo, who was older even though they were in the same grade. Tommy’s mother thought they were both rough, but Carmen really wasn’t. Both of them came to the door with Mr. Bonnaro just after his father had opened Margie’s gift, and all of them stood in the front hall while Tommy’s father thanked him for the wine and Mr. Bonnaro said, looking into the living room at the piles of gifts, “Lucky family, lucky, lucky family—so much of the things, so much of the love.”

  “Yes,” his mother said, “fortunate. We’re all so fortunate, aren’t we, Mr. Bonnaro, to be here in this country where there is so much.”

  “So much, so much,” Mr. Bonnaro said, only he pronounced it “much-a.” That was his Italian accent.

  There was, indeed, a lot, and Tommy felt a little embarrassed at the sight of it all. He got the windup truck that Nick had given him and showed it to Carmen and Leo. He would have shown them the Monopoly set, but he was afraid it looked too fancy.

  When the Bonnaros had left—they stayed only a minute because Mr. Bonnaro said they had to leave Mr. MacAllister’s family to their Christmas—Tommy’s father took the wine down to the cellar, where he put it with the jugs from other Christmases. When he came back up, he went straight to the desk in the hall. The desk had a lot of drawers and all of them locked; nobody but his father and his mother were allowed in it. When he came into the living room he went over to Tommy’s mother, who was sitting on the piano bench explaining to Margie and Nick that Mr. Bonnaro brought Mr. MacAllister wine every year—“He makes it himself, you know, from the grapes in his garden”—and he bent over and gave her a kiss, right on the lips. His mother seemed a little surprised, and she pretended to be surprised when his father handed her a check, neatly folded in half. She opened it a tiny bit, peeked at it, and said, “Oh, my, won’t I have fun?” She kissed him back. In addition to the usual check, though, Tommy’s father gave his mother his grandmother’s pearls. They were still wrapped in the tissue the undertaker had put them in. His mother took them out of the paper, letting it fall to the floor, and tried to fasten the pearls around her neck, getting them tangled with her poinsettia pin.

  “Oh, Tommy, you help me, will you? I can never manage to figure out these clasps,” she said. Tommy knelt behind his mother on the piano bench to fasten the clasp at the back of her neck. It was a beautiful clasp, and precious; there were real sapphires in it. When he had finished, his mother shook the pearls to untangle them from her pin. Tommy’s arm reached around his mother’s shoulder to help her, his own fingers tangling with hers, with the pearls, and with the pin on her bosom. When the pearls were finally loosed, she stood up, putting one arm around his father’s shoulder and kissing him on the cheek. “Thank you, dear,” she said, “thank you,” and the pearls seemed to glow against the scarlet of her dress, the whiteness of her throat. They looked very beautiful. For a minute Tommy felt sad, and he remembered the vivid sweet smell of his grandmother’s currant biscuits floating through the house on Christmas morning, biscuits he would never taste again.

  Tommy wanted to leave. He wanted to see the Steers’ Christmas tree and what Amy Steer had gotten for Christmas, and he wanted to show Jimmy Randolph his Monopoly set. He asked if he could go, and since the morning’s festivities were dying down his mother said yes, he could, but he shouldn’t be gone too long because they were all going to the Sedgwicks’ for dinner later that afternoon. His mother made him get into his snow pants, even though he promised to hurry and the Steers lived only at the corner of the next block—he could see their house from his window—and she strung the mittens she had knit him for Christmas through the sleeves of his jacket. She gave him mittens every Christmas, and they were always attached to each other with a knitted cord so he wouldn’t lose them. Even so, he sometimes did.

  Tommy picked up his Monopoly set, said goodbye to everybody, and went out. The street was empty because it was Christmas, and Tommy walked in the middle of the road. He was happy. The sun was shining and the snow wasn’t very deep. He could still see over the snowbanks and see the lighted Christmas tree inside the Randolphs’ house. He was eager to see the Steers’ tree, and he thought Mrs. Steer might give him a piece of her rum pie, if there was any left over from Christmas Eve. She always made rum pie for Christmas Eve, and she always wore a long dress and invited Mrs. Wentworth and Mrs. Addington, Mr. Treverton, Dr. Rodgers and his wife and their children, who were in Amy’s class, and sometimes other people, too. Tommy and Amy would have been in the same grade, but Amy had skipped one and she went to the Catholic school, even though she wasn’t a Catholic. Mrs. Steer said you got a better education there, and she must have known, because Mr. Steer used to be on the school board. Everybody was mad at him when he sent Amy to the Catholic school, and he was defeated in the next election. Sure enough, Mrs. Steer had saved him a piece of pie. She thanked him for the matches, too, and she had a little present for him underneath the tree, a package of the Christmas cookies she had been making and storing in coffee tins ever since Thanksgiving. She had arranged the cookies in three overlapping circles in the box, which she had wrapped in red tissue paper and tied with a golden cord. She decorated the box with a Christmas ornament she had made from half a walnut shell. Mrs. Steer was good at making things like that.

  Amy showed him the old china doll with porcelain eyes that her mother had given her. She was very proud of it, because now she was old enough to handle it right. The doll was very big and had been her mother’s as a child in Denmark. It still wore the same blue velvet dress with the lace collar that it had worn when her mother played with it. Mrs. Steer had also sewn a whole new wardrobe for it, and Mr. Steer had made a cradle for it to sleep in. The doll was very fragile. Amy wouldn’t let Tommy pick it up, but that was all right with Tommy. He didn’t really like dolls, and he was never envious that girls could play with them and boys couldn’t. The thing that interested him most about dolls was that there was never anything underneath; sometimes they had a belly button but that was all. He did like playing dress-up and make-believe, though, and Mrs. Steer had a lot of old clothes that he and Amy would play in. Tommy always had to be the prince or the villain—sometimes the prince was the villain—but either way he got to wear a burgundy velvet cape that had once been a curtain in the Steers’ house until Mrs. Steer’s mother died and she had done th
e house over. He liked the cape, and he liked making up the story as it went along. Once they were on an ocean liner and the waiter brought them peas for dinner and they threw the peas over their shoulders on the people at the next table. The plates broke and the waiter had to scramble to pick up the peas, which rolled all over the place because the ship was rocking. The people were very mad, and he and Amy were very haughty to the waiter and told him not to bring them peas anymore, that they hated peas. It was all make-believe, even the plates—even the waiter, because no one would play with him. And in the summer, before they all moved to the Island, they would set up card-table-and-blanket tents in Tommy’s backyard. His parents had a lot of card tables, so there were a lot of rooms in their playhouse. That was a lot of fun. It should have been cool inside the tents, but instead it was very hot though the light was dim, and they would take off some of their clothes. Jimmy Randolph played, too, and also the two Slade girls next door. Lily and Jenny always wanted them to take off all their clothes and play greeny-and-whitey, which was what they called that game, but since they wouldn’t take off all of theirs, though they had promised, nobody ever wanted to play it. It wasn’t fair. The tent was like a big cave because you could crawl from one card table to another, and it was fun. They always wanted to spend the night in the cave, but Tommy wasn’t allowed. He had to sleep in his own bed. So did Amy. Besides, the card tables had to come inside or the morning dew would ruin them.

  “Well, Tommy,” Mrs. Steer said, “if you come back later, when it’s getting dark, I’ll light the candles on the tree.”

  “And bring your Monopoly set,” Amy interjected. She didn’t have one. They always played on Jimmy Randolph’s.

  “You know you’re invited. You know you’re welcome.”