by Jim Shepard
“Why don’t you just pull right out, trooper.” Ronnie’s voice was low and even and terrifying. “Don’t even bother to wipe the goo off. Get up.”
The bed squeaked and someone’s leg appeared beyond his silhouette.
“Get your car keys.” Ronnie still hadn’t moved. There was a jingling of a belt buckle and coins. He gestured past Biddy down the hall, the sudden motion startling. “Get out.”
The other man said something, his voice low, as frightened as Biddy would have been.
“Touch those clothes and I’ll cut your pecker off. Get out.”
The man said something about pants.
“Get out.” Ronnie’s voice was indescribable: Biddy was momentarily certain that if he was discovered he’d be killed as well.
The man popped through the doorway abruptly, naked, his penis gleaming before Biddy could look away: the man in the store, Sean. Ronnie followed him down the hall, and the back door opened and slammed shut. Biddy imagined the man standing naked in the driveway, bare feet on the ice.
In the bedroom he saw Cindy’s naked thigh, her arms struggling with a pair of pants. The closet door swung open. Ronnie loomed above him, the knife pointed at the floor. Biddy froze, breath changing direction in his throat. “All right, get out of here,” Ronnie said. “The show’s over.” He called Mickey, his raised voice the first loud noise in the house.
Biddy scrambled from the closet, intercepting Mickey in the kitchen in his rush to the door.
“What’s going on?” Mickey said. “Did Cindy leave?” Biddy shook his head, unable to speak. “I couldn’t find all the pieces to the Stratamatic.” Mickey opened the back door and stepped out. “I should tell my parents those two were here when they weren’t supposed to be.”
He continued to talk, and at the corner Biddy collapsed to a sitting position and refused to get up, mired, it seemed, in the ice and snow, not responding, tears filling his eyes and the cold and wet coming through his pants, until Mickey gave up in exasperation and left, disappearing in the direction of Biddy’s home, leaving him alone and soaked in the rear with the night closing in around him.
“Biddy’s sitting in the road and he won’t get up,” Mickey announced after taking off his mittens in the Sieberts’ kitchen.
His father arrived in minutes, the dark Buick pulling up next to him and sliding a little in its haste to stop. He wouldn’t respond to questions and his father, impatient, frightened, and despairing, finally picked him up, Biddy as quiescent as a drunk or baby, and carried him into the car. All he was able to say was “Nothing” in response to their questions of what was wrong, what had happened. Mickey was almost no help. Biddy was put to bed. Mickey was put in front of the television. Kristi stayed in the living room, shooting at ornaments with a rubber band. His parents huddled outside his room debating in fierce whispers what should be done. His mother wanted to call Dr. Hanzlik here, now, this minute, get him out of bed if they had to. His father favored waiting until after Christmas: Hanzlik probably wouldn’t see him until then anyway, and why ruin everyone’s Christmas? And who knew what was wrong? Who knew how serious it was? Maybe he’d seen another three-legged dog, for all they knew.
Finally, in whispers that grew calmer, they got hold of themselves and decided they’d wait until after the holidays.
Before she went to bed, Kristi poked her head into his room, a crack of light from the hall spreading across the floor.
“Are you sick?” she said.
He lay under his covers like an exhausted Channel swimmer.
“They say to leave you alone.” She stepped a bit farther in, the hall light slanting across her cheek, catching on her hair. “Cindy called you. They said you were sick and couldn’t come to the phone.”
He lay as if asleep.
“Are you gonna get real sick right before Christmas?”
He opened his eyes at the worry in her voice, and raised his head. “You don’t want me to get sick?” he asked quietly.
She sat on the edge of the bed. “No.”
They remained where they were. The furnace kicked on in the cellar.
She rubbed her leg. “Know what I got you for Christmas?”
He shook his head, his hair making soft noises against the pillow. “Where’s Mickey?”
“They got him downstairs in the living room. He says you have a nervous breakdown.”
He shook his head again. “I don’t have a nervous breakdown.”
In the near darkness he could see her picking self-consciously or abstractedly at the covers. “Mickey said you wouldn’t get off the road.” He shifted under the covers. “Are you okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“If I did that they’d kill me.”
He let it go.
“The Sisters say I should be nicer to you.” She waited, the air audible now in the heating vents. “Do they say that to you?”
He wiped his nose on the covers. “They say that to everybody.”
She rose to leave. “I hope you’re not sick. If you’re still sick tomorrow, I’ll ask if we can eat up here.”
“Thanks. That’d be good,” he said, and she closed the door behind her, her hair under the light as beautiful as he had ever seen it before the black door shut it out.
“Get out of bed, pal. You may not have any Christmas spirit but you got some singing to do.” His father stripped the bed of blankets and sheet with one pull, leaving him a fish on a beach, foolish and exposed. The cool air chilled his feet.
“Let’s go. Your Aunt Rosie’s coming over and you’re not receiving visitors in bed.”
He had been in bed all day this Christmas Eve. Cindy had called again, his sister had had jelly sandwiches with him on a TV tray for lunch, and his father had gone over to the school to pick up his choir robe. His mother had come up to talk with him while she was baking. His father decided enough was enough forty-five minutes before company was due to arrive.
“You see your Aunt Rosie twice a year,” he said. “You can make a little effort. You can only take this Camille bit so far.”
His Aunt Rosie was actually his mother’s aunt, who lived in upstate New York and came down to visit that part of the family in Connecticut—her nieces’ families—twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year she had missed Thanksgiving. She would see everyone at Christmas, she’d said. And besides, who wanted to drive all the way up there, pick her up, and take her back? She was in her nineties and had come over from Naples fifty-three years earlier and was still convinced her stay in America was only temporary.
She never had pretended to understand any of the children, but Judy’s Eustace was another story altogether. From start to finish: What kind of name was Biddy? Or Eustace, for that matter? And he was always standing around like a chidrule. He never ate. You could count his ribs. He was a nice boy and he gave them nothing but worries.
Biddy stood in the shower, soaping up. His father was shaving and singing “The First Noël.” In the living room his mother was vacuuming and the stereo was playing “Buona Natale,” from a Jimmy Roselli Christmas album. Kristi was watching Miracle on 34th Street in the den, with the volume turned up. Rather than mixing, the sounds were fighting with each other for his attention, snatches of one, then the other, dominating.
His father grinned at him when he came into the kitchen dripping and barefoot, hoping to coax him into the same hearty good humor by example. His mother was levering red-and-beige cookies off a metal sheet with a spatula. He rubbed his arm dry, his wet hair stiff and cold on his neck.
“Look at him. He’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders,” his father teased.
“Your clothes are laid out upstairs,” his mother said. “What time did Sister say to be over there?” He could sense their anxiety in the tone of her voice: what if he refused to respond and continued to refuse to respond? He had an unpleasant feeling of power. “Eleven-thirty,” he said, and headed obediently for the stairs.
Rose arrived a few minutes
later in a welter of greetings and warnings about icy steps. She leaned on Michael’s arm, and one by one they kissed her. Biddy still didn’t look good, Kristi was getting bigger and bigger, and what had Judy done to her hair?
“I cut it, Rosie,” his mother said. “I want it off the face. I don’t want to have to worry about it for a while.”
Rose suggested she looked like a feminist.
Michael and Sandy brought the presents into the living room and piled them under the tree. They’d driven Rosie down the day before, and were now taking her from relative to relative on her Christmas tour. They looked tired already.
She was led into the living room and settled into a chair near the tree while his father put on his Mario Lanza record, a Christmas tradition when she visited. It was not a Christmas album, but Rose didn’t have a stereo and Mario Lanza held a place in her personal pantheon, his father said, just a notch or two below the Holy Ghost. Her hearing was still sharp. She’d just have a little of the homemade white wine she’d brought, they shouldn’t bother over her, sit down, relax. Mario Lanza sang “My Buddy.” To Biddy it always sounded like “My Body.”
“What about this one?” Rosie asked, gesturing toward Kristi, who was edging her present back and forth on the rug with her toe as if movement might reveal its nature. “How’s she been?”
His mother sipped her drink, which was a rich honey color in the warm lights of the lamp and tree. “She’s been okay. You know. Stubborn as ever.”
“She’s the scourge of the nuns,” his father said. “She has them living in fear.” Michael and Sandy chuckled, and Kristi rocked back and forth, pleased with the attention.
“What about Biddy?” Rose said. “Has he been behaving?”
Both his parents hesitated and his father set down his drink. “We had a little excitement yesterday.” He gestured toward her with his head. “Tell Rosie what you did yesterday.”
Biddy looked into her eyes.
“He sat down over on Ryegate Terrace over here last night and—”
“Where?”
“Over here on Ryegate Terrace, where the Lirianos live, and he decided he wouldn’t get up.”
“He couldn’t get up?”
“He wouldn’t get up.”
It took some additional discussion to make it clear to her what they meant. Once she had it clear in her mind, she looked at him, baffled. “Why wouldn’t he get up?”
“He won’t tell us. Maybe the world grew too heavy on his shoulders. I had to pick him up in my car.”
“What’re you, cuckoo?” Rose said, concerned.
Biddy managed a smile.
“You’re cuckoo sometimes,” she decided.
“I think he saw another hurt dog,” his father said. “Is that what it was?”
“I didn’t see any dog.”
“Are you going to be able to go to midnight Mass with us?” his mother asked. “Biddy’s in the choir this year.”
“I heard,” Rose said. “Sandy and Michael told me.”
“Sister said his voice is just like an angel’s.”
“It’s pretty icy out, Rose,” Michael said.
“I’m going to go,” she said. “If Sandy and Michael can wait around.”
Sandy and Michael, sagging noticeably, said that would be fine.
She requested that Biddy sit next to her at dinner, whether to show he was favored or to keep a closer eye on him he wasn’t sure. She tried a bit of everything that was put on the table: fennel and black olives, prosciutto and melon, turkey and turnips, mashed potatoes, stuffing, yams in syrup, broccoli. She spooned out his portions besides, claiming if he’d mangia a little more he wouldn’t look like such a ghost. She waved her hand slightly and shook her head, chewing. “Yesterday on Mervin Griffin they got two women in love,” she said. “Two women in love. You believe that?”
“No, Rose, they were kidding you,” Michael said. “They were just friends.”
“Two women in love.” She gave up, appalled either way.
Dessert was anisette cookies and coffee, of which he had two cups since he was singing in the choir.
Afterward they returned to the living room and the tree, all of them directing Michael as he resat Rosie. His mother talked with Sandy about the President, whom they considered a fool. Michael asked his father what the heating bills had been like that winter. Kristi lay with her head under the tree, inert. He was left with Rose, who watched him every so often as if, sitting at her feet in front of the Christmas tree, he might betray what had prompted him to refuse to get off an icy street the evening before.
“You looking forward to singing tonight?” she asked. Her hair was white and uneven and her skin hung in soft folds beneath her neck. “You nervous?”
He shrugged.
“What are you gonna sing?”
He went back over his songs, remembering bits of the practice sessions: “‘Joy to the World!,’ ‘Angels We Have Heard on High,’ ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful,’ ‘Silent Night,’ and ‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.’”
She fidgeted and asked if he’d had enough to eat.
He assured her that he had. He’d never had so much mashed potatoes, he added as proof.
She smiled. “You know who used to love mashed potatoes? Your grandfather. We used to fight over the mashed potatoes when he’d come over for dinner. You know what he’d do? He’d take his false teeth out, like a cavone, right there at the table, and throw them into the bowl, and ask, ‘Anybody want any potatoes?’”
Biddy laughed.
“Of course we didn’t. We just learned, that’s all. Make two bowls when your grandfather came over.” She smiled again and rubbed the top of his head. “You going to come up and see me in Albany?”
He agreed to if his parents came up. “Are you okay? They said you were sick around Thanksgiving.”
“They worry too much. I tell them, I’m ninety-two. Very few people die at ninety-two.” She gave him a sip of her anisette.
At eleven he went upstairs to change. His mother had laid out a white shirt, black tie, and black pants on the bed. His father had polished his black shoes to a high gloss. He put everything on and combed his hair in the upstairs bathroom, wetting down one area that stuck up stubbornly and holding his hand over it.
When he returned there was a good deal of talk concerning how sharp he looked, Rose remarking on it three or four times. His father dug the choir robe out of the hall closet, and he tried it on for the benefit of those assembled. It was scarlet and pleated at the shoulders, billowing out at the arms. The fit was perfect, the hem brushing his shoe tops. He took it off and stuffed it back in the box. As he left, they called “Good luck” from the kitchen and the living room.
The room off the sacristy where the altar boys changed was six feet or so by fifteen, with a good three feet of that width taken up by cassocks and hanger space, and when he arrived all the boys in the choir—eight of them besides himself—were crammed in shoulder to shoulder, arms swinging and pivoting, trying to climb into their robes. The walls, which were unpainted cement, echoed the giggles and whispers back at them, and magnified the musical crash of metal hangers on the floor. He noticed Teddy, apparently reinstated, without surprise. Teddy’s robe didn’t fit; it hung just below his knees. His pants stopped just above his ankles, producing a silly, tiered effect. “I shoulda looked at it when I picked it up,” he said. “Or I shouldn’ta come back. Now I look like a retard.”
Father poked his head in and whispered to quiet down, and there was a good deal of accidental and intended slapping while they tried to get their arms into their sleeves. Someone hit the forty-watt bulb above them and it swayed back and forth, swinging shadows across their faces and producing an effect worthy of a horror film. “Curse of Dracula,” Teddy said. They all made what they believed to be horror-film sounds, and Father had to poke his head in again.
Once ready, they lined up in the sacristy proper to wait for the girls. “We gotta dress in a closet and he gets all this
,” Teddy whispered into his ear.
Father stood before them in a white chasuble, with thick gold bands forming a cross from shoulder to shoulder and neck to hem, INRI printed at the apex inlaid with black and gold. The gold seemed impossibly rich and provoked a kind of reverence in all of them. The door leading to the spare rooms in back creaked open and Sister led the girls in, most of them looking prettier than any of the boys would have thought physically possible. Laura slipped by him, her brushed hair golden brown over the scarlet shoulders of her robe. Sister checked the formation one final time before she left them, with a nod intended to inspire confidence, and took her place at the organ. When it swelled to life, Father finally broke into a smile and said, “Merry Christmas. And sing your brains out.” He turned and took a measured step down and out of the sacristy, and they followed in a controlled mass, hands clasped in front of them as Sister had instructed.
They were singing as the congregation rose to greet them, the pews thundering dully, and they filed down the side aisle past the familiar faces of friends, relatives, and neighbors. The entrance hymn was “Joy to the World!” and Biddy was only aware of singing it halfway into the second chorus. From the side they turned up the center aisle, Christ high on his cross above them and never closer, red and white poinsettias flanking the altar like a Christmas jungle, gold everywhere and glittering with the candlelight and occasion: candlesticks, chalices, water and wine vessels, the tabernacle. They stepped up from outer to inner altar, turned in pairs past Sister to the right, and filed into the choir pews as if they’d grown up filing into choir pews. After one more chorus the singing stopped. The lay reader announced—because of the special treat of a real choir this year—a second entrance hymn, number 36 in the missalettes: “Angels We Have Heard on High.” As they rose to sing he glanced down the row of faces alongside him with a growing happiness and pride that one could only begin to feel when singing, and singing well when it wasn’t expected, in a makeshift choir on Christmas Eve. His voice rose as the highest and strongest soprano, with Teddy and Sarah Alice’s right beside it, supporting, and the others ranging alongside in chorus. They were a unit singing as a part of a celebration separate from Sister and Father and even the Mass, and yet privy to it in a more wonderful way because of that separation. He led everyone in the song through the soaring eighteen-note expansion of the Gloria and the supporting In Excelsis Deo, and back through the Gloria again, to finish by expanding the supporting phrase in a final cadence: “In Excelsis De-e-eo.”