The Christmas Kid

by Pete Hamill

  “I feel like a million bucks,” Charlie Deane said one night. “I’ll never touch this stuff again.” He was sitting on his usual stool at the bar. His pants were pressed, his hair neatly trimmed, his face closely shaved. “The wife even talks to me now. First time in three years.”

  Dinny Collins scoffed. “Wait’ll you hear what she’s been saying. You’ll want to get stewed another three years.”

  A few of the converts did fall off the wagon; but many stayed dry. Kelly’s stock in the neighborhood rose even higher. The monsignor of the church wrote a note to the archbishop, telling him how wonderful this fellow Kelly was; the archbishop wrote the bishop, and the bishop wrote to the president of Kelly’s bank. Within the month, Kelly had been named manager of the neighborhood branch. Everybody thought this was wonderful. Wives streamed into the branch to congratulate Kelly, and dozens moved their small accounts to Kelly’s bank. The first sign of Kelly’s wider prosperity was a new car. A small trophy, to be sure, but too much for Dinny Collins.

  “Well, he got himself an early Christmas present,” Dinny said one Saturday afternoon that winter, watching Kelly drive by, his wife and kids in the car. “What’s next?”

  At the AA meetings, Kelly gradually displayed other changes. His hair was more carefully cut; he had two new suits, wonderfully tailored, and had replaced his old Thom McAn brogans with some wonderfully polished English shoes. He was a banker now; a watch fob appeared in his vest; a smile was permanently pasted to his face. Since he could help with loans, everybody was polite to him; some even fawned. The ability to grant a loan, or forgive a bounced check, was, of course, a form of power. Wonderful Kelly used that power judiciously, urging his supplicants to give up the sauce, to go back to church, to be kinder to their wives.

  Then one Friday evening in the spring, Carol Kelly appeared in the door of Rattigan’s. The bar was almost empty. Dinny Collins was playing a game on the shuffleboard machine with JoJo Mullarkey, who used to get drunk and eat glasses before joining AA. Dinny looked at the woman, who had never been in Rattigan’s before, and nodded. Her hair was blowsy, her light spring coat open, her eyes scared.

  “Uh, er, uh, excuse me, but, uh…have you seen my husband?” she said.

  “You mean Wonderful Kelly?” Dinny Collins said. “No, ma’am, I can’t say as I have. He doesn’t come in that often, and when he does, it’s bad for business.”

  “I see…”

  “You try up the church?” JoJo Mullarkey said. “I mean, that’s where he is lots of the time.”

  “Yes, I…well, thank you, gents.”

  Dinny came closer. “Is there anything wrong?”

  “No, no, nothing’s wrong. I er, uh—”

  And she hurried into the night. An hour later, Father Donnelly came in, also looking for Wonderful Kelly. They learned that Wonderful had gone out for lunch that day and had never come back. By midnight, two detectives from the 72nd Precinct had been in, and there had been two more calls from Carol. But nobody had seen Wonderful Kelly.

  They didn’t see him that weekend, and he didn’t come to work that Monday. And when the cops descended upon the bank, and the big shots came over from the main office in Manhattan, and the examiners were finally called in, they all knew why. There was $276,000 missing from the bank, along with Wonderful Kelly.

  This news appeared on page 1 of the Brooklyn Eagle, and its first effect was to destroy the AA meeting that night. Many of the men felt they would rather be honest drunks than disciples of an embezzler. Others felt that Wonderful Kelly had absconded with more than money; he had embezzled their emotions, too. Rattigan’s was packed that night, loud with the sounds of men falling off wagons. Dinny Collins sat in righteous splendor at the bar.

  “Hitler didn’t drink,” he said. “Stalin didn’t drink. And neither did Wonderful Kelly. You don’t have to be a genius to see the moral of this story, do you?”

  When the details emerged, so did the neighborhood’s anger. Kelly had worked out a system of faking the paperwork on loans. People from the neighborhood would sit at his desk and sign for a $3,000 loan, and when they were gone, Kelly would change the paperwork and make it $5,000. The bank said it would not hold the customers to the phony figures, of course; but many people felt that Wonderful Kelly had used them for his own gain. There was no pity for him, and very little for his wife and children. After a week, the wife stopped coming to church; the children were teased terribly in school, and there was talk that they were all going to move. And there wasn’t a word from Wonderful Kelly. He seemed to have vanished from the earth.

  Then one snowy Saturday morning the following February, Dinny Collins walked into Rattigan’s with a Daily News. He held it up for all to see. “Will you look at this?” he said. And they all gazed at a picture of Wonderful Kelly on page 4, his hair longer, his hands cuffed in front of him, and a bosomy, handcuffed blonde beside him. The story was out of Tampa, Florida, under a headline that read: EXEC, STRIPPER NABBED IN BANK THEFT. The men standing grimly behind Kelly were FBI agents.

  “He ran off with a stripper?” JoJo Mullarkey said.

  “He sure did,” Dinny Collins said. “I think it’s the most wonderful thing he ever did.”

  The Warrior’s Son

  MOST MEN IN THAT neighborhood thought Soldier Dunne had been born in a most fortunate year: 1937. This accident of birth made him too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, a stroke of luck that would have overjoyed the young men who had to fight those wars. But Dunne did not consider himself lucky; in fact, he was furious at his fate. More than any man in that neighborhood, he thought that a real man’s greatest glory was war. In 1955, when a perforated eardrum kept him out of the peacetime army, his anger soared into rage.

  “This country is soft as mush!” he shouted one night at the bar in Rattigan’s. “We shoulda done what MacArthur wanted, just keep on goin’ into Red China! We should be fightin’ them right now!” He slammed the bar for emphasis. “Then they wouldn’t keep me out of it! Not for a damn pinhole in an eardrum!”

  But the bureaucratic decision was final; Dunne was doomed to remain a civilian all his life. And so he tried to make up for his loss in other ways. He bought most of his clothes in army-navy stores, appearing in smartly cut khakis in the neighborhood bars, his jump boots gleaming, his posture erect, his hair chopped short in a crew cut. He read military history, lecturing late at night about great battles “we” fought, and—during Vietnam—how victory could be won. When he was in his mid-twenties, the men of that neighborhood began to call him Soldier, and, grim-faced, squinty-eyed, shoulders squared, Dunne wore the ironic title as a badge of honor.

  Along the way, Soldier Dunne married a quiet, pretty neighborhood girl named Marge Rivington, went to work at the gas company, and fathered two daughters and a son, each of whom was required to call him sir. He ran his home with the discipline of a company commander. Food was “chow,” the kitchen was “the mess,” the bathroom “the latrine.” On the walls of the living room he hung framed photographs of Douglas MacArthur, Omar Bradley, and Mark Clark; a huge American flag billowed on a pole outside his window every day of the week; he mourned the death of John Wayne, traveled once a year to Arlington to salute the fallen heroes of the republic, and when asked his favorite song would always reply: “You gotta stand when they play it.”

  Naturally, his first daughter ran away and married an ironworker when she was seventeen. The second lasted until her eighteenth birthday; she took $216 she had saved, flew off to Orlando, became a tour guide at Disney World, and married an animal trainer. Soldier Dunne’s attention then fell most heavily upon his son, Jack. His attention, and his alarm. For Jack was not the son that Soldier had hoped for.

  “He’s a nice kid,” he said a few times, when pressed by other members of the Saturday night infantry. “Takes after his mother, know what I mean? Reads a lot. Smart, that kid. Smart.”

  But the truth was that at home they barely spoke. Jack had refused when he was thirteen to ca
ll his father sir, a small mutiny that Soldier punished by confining the boy to quarters. Confinement was ended through the tearful intercession of Soldier’s wife, Marge, whom Dunne started calling the judge advocate general. The boy said nothing. He never called his father sir again.

  Worse, the young man resisted the military impulse. He thought parades were boring. He wouldn’t play with guns. He laughed at John Wayne movies. He read his books, listened to rock and roll, kept the door to his room closed. When Soldier offered to take the boy on his annual pilgrimage to Arlington, the boy turned him down; he was going with his friends to see the Rolling Stones. Then one evening, in the young man’s seventeenth year, Soldier Dunne came to his son’s room. He was carrying a thick manila envelope. Jack was listening to music on a Walkman. He looked up at his father, but he didn’t move.

  “Hey!” Soldier shouted. “You think I’m standing here for my health?”

  Jack removed the headset and sat up. “What is it, Dad? The Russians invade or something?”

  “Don’t be a wise guy,” the father said. “I want to talk to you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Look,” the father said. “You’re almost eighteen. You gotta start thinking about the rest of your life.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I think I know what you gotta do. Nex’ June, when you graduate, go right in the army. They’re giving great deals now to high school graduates. You can pick a career. Electronics. Computers. All kinds of things. The money’s great. It’ll be the bes’ thing ever happened to you, believe me.”

  He opened the manila envelope and took out a batch of brochures; the army, navy, and marines were all represented.

  “Where’s the air force?” the young man said, smiling.

  “Ah, hell, that’s not for you,” he said. “That’s not like the real service. But if you want, why don’t you…”

  “Forget it, Dad,” Jack said. “I’m not going in the service.”

  The father stood very erect. “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You’re a man, ain’t you?” the father said, his voice rising. “A real man serves his country if he has the chance. I didn’t have the chance. They turned me down. But you got nothin’ wrong with you. They won’t turn you down. They…”

  “I’m going to college, Dad.”

  “College?”

  The word fell between them like a sword. Soldier Dunne turned abruptly on his heel and walked out of the room and out of the house. At the bar across the street, he drank a beer in silence. College. Not even West Point, or Annapolis. Just college. It wasn’t as if he had already served his country and was going on the GI Bill. He was just going to college. That’s why the country was going to seed; these kids were soft; they had no discipline; they didn’t know what it was like to fight, to bleed, to die for your country. No wonder the Russians were pushing us around everywhere. They had infantry, planes, bombs, tanks, trained killers, spies; we had college boys!

  “You all right, Soldier?” said Loftus, the bartender. “You look like yer gonna cry.”

  “It’s a sad day for this country,” Soldier said.

  “What happened?” Loftus said. “I miss the news?”

  “My kid’s going to college.”

  Loftus laughed out loud. “That’s great. Soldier. Why’re you sayin’ it’s sad?”

  Soldier snapped to attention and said: “You’d never understand.”

  He walked out of the bar and marched through the dark streets of the neighborhood for hours, until his legs grew heavy and his hands cold and he headed home. As he crossed the avenue, he saw a figure standing in the vestibule of his building. He tensed, ready for combat. But when he came closer, he saw that the shadowy figure was only his wife. Good old Marge. Waiting up for me. He smiled and opened the outer door.

  She stepped forward and slapped him hard across the face.

  “You dumb son of a bitch,” she said.

  Soldier stepped back, a hand to his stinging face, and said: “What is this? What’s going on? What’s this about?”

  “Your son’s upstairs bawling his eyes out,” she said. “That’s what this is about!” Then, her face furious, she slapped him again. “I took your crap for a long time, Mr. Dunne. All this soldier-boy gobbledygook, all this yes-sir-no-sir baloney. Well, you drove the girls out with it. But you’re not gonna do it to Jack. I’m not gonna let you, Mr. Dunne.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I want you out of the house,” she said in a cold voice. “Tonight. Pack your bags and go. Get a room at the Y. Sleep on the subway. I don’t care. But get the hell out.”

  Soldier backed up against the wall, stunned, riddled with words that came at him like bullets. He tried to speak, but nothing came out of his mouth. His legs were gone, his head ringing. He slid down the wall to a squatting position. His post had been overrun.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. She looked down at him, as if prepared to shoot the wounded.

  “Save it for the boy,” she said, doing an about-face and hurrying up the stairs. Soldier squatted there for a long time, listening to the wind blow down the avenue. After a while, he thought: Maybe he’ll at least join the ROTC. And then slowly, he rose to his feet and started up the stairs, hoping the enemy would accept his unconditional surrender.

  The Second Summer

  THE HADDAMS WERE SYRIANS and they ran a small grocery store on the corner of Eddie Leonard’s block. It was not unusual to be a Syrian in that neighborhood in Brooklyn; there were Syrians at Holy Virgin School, and Syrians running other shops. Most of them were Catholics, and many of them had moved to the neighborhood after the war, when Little Syria in Lower Manhattan had been cleared to make way for the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. But some, like the Haddams, had come directly from Syria.

  To Eddie Leonard and his friends, Syria was itself a mysterious place; they knew that if you went to Ireland and Italy and kept going east, you’d find it. But it was not clearly defined on the old roll-down prewar maps. It was like Lithuania, where Eddie Waivada came from. A lost country. Atlantis.

  Eddie Leonard always felt this mystery when he went into the Haddams’ dark, cramped store. The father was a gray, bony man, with desolate eyes; he spoke in his own language to his small, gray wife, and sometimes in another language, which Eddie Leonard later realized was French. Mr. Haddam’s weariness infected his older daughter, a thin, pale young woman named Victoria. She had a large nose, large hands and feet, and seemed always to be chewing the inside of her mouth.

  Dotty Haddam was her opposite, and when Eddie Leonard was fourteen, she started making him feel strange. She was two years younger and a foot shorter than Victoria, with clean straight features, hard white teeth, small hands, and the blackest hair Eddie Leonard had even seen. She rode a bicycle everywhere, pedaling furiously on a shiny blue Schwinn, and as a result, she had legs like a man’s legs: hard and defined, with a ball of muscle at the calf. Those legs added to Eddie Leonard’s uneasiness when she waited on him diffidently in the store. She was a year behind him at Holy Virgin School, but she seemed much older.

  Through the winter of his first year in high school, Eddie Leonard didn’t see much of Dotty Haddam. He was trying to translate Caesar’s Gallic Wars into English and deal with the baffling abstractions of algebra. From time to time, he saw her moving through the snow, bundled up against the cold, head down, legs encased in boots. He saw her in the back of the store, watching a small black-and-white television set, or studying for school. But he didn’t truly see her again until spring, when the stirring of the earth in the park and the broadcast of the Dodger games from Florida combined to tell him that the winter was over. Suddenly Dotty Haddam was back on her bicycle, taller now, her breasts fuller, her black hair longer. She smiled at him when he came into the store, and then he met her at a party in Betty Kayata’s house, and asked her to go to a movie, and she said yes, and after that they were inseparable.

  Across the thick
, ripe summer, he explained Latin to her; warned her about algebra; taught her some Irish songs. She told him she wanted to be a poet, although her father objected; she showed him her poems, shyly at first, then with greater confidence. She had discovered Keats and Byron, and made him read them out loud to her in Prospect Park. She showed him where Syria was, too, pointing to maps that showed Damascus and Beirut. She had a postcard from her cousin Frankie, who lived in Beirut; it showed a lovely city on green hills, spread in a semicircle, facing the sea. Eddie Leonard pointed out that the map called the place Lebanon. She said it was really all Syria. Her father said so. The French had decided the borders, but it was all really Syria, although her father said that Damascus was an ugly city.

  That summer, the war broke out in Korea, but they didn’t talk about the war; it was in a remote place; it had nothing to do with them. But they were aware that the world was changing around them. People were locking doors that had never before been locked. A boy from 17th Street was found dead in the park, and for the first time Eddie Leonard heard the word “overdose.” The word “they” began to appear in the common narrative of the neighborhood. “I hear they stuck up Barney Quigley’s last night.” Or: “They stabbed a kid outside the Y this afternoon.” Or: “They robbed the Greek’s.” Another new word was “heroin.”

  Late in August, after a Saturday night movie, Eddie Leonard and Dotty Haddam climbed the hill above the Swan Lake in Prospect Park, and when they came down, they were no longer virgins. The rest of the summer was a blur; joy, fear, and amazement were combined with a sense of intimate conspiracy and, of course, the heart-stopping knowledge of sin. Moving among the others, on the beach at Coney or at the dances in the park, they felt special, certain of their shared love and damnation, guarding their dark secret.

  But as the nights became chilly, Eddie Leonard started to dread the coming of winter. In that neighborhood in those years, no young people had cars or apartments or the price of a hotel room. They had the park and the beach. Nothing else. Eddie began to talk to Dotty Haddam about running away to Florida, about how amazing it must be to sleep between sheets in a bed, and wake up together in the morning. She resisted, retreated into silence, or told him that such ideas were foolish. They were too young. They would end up in jail.