When she came into the living room to fill their stockings, she was surprised to see that there was something in her own—and when she felt through the sock, she could tell it wasn’t coal after all.
Well, of course, they wouldn’t have come empty-handed to visit her, so when they had to stay over on Christmas Eve, they decided to slip it into her stocking. It felt like a book, and that would be nice, a book was like food, you could consume it and pass it along. She’d open it tomorrow. She was a big girl now. She could wait to find out what Santa had brought.
Then she got out an old crayon picture in a frame and set it on the mantel. “Not long now, Ernie,” she said. “If you still remember who I am.”
In the morning, she was awakened by their whispering and pan-banging in the kitchen. Just like we used to wake Mom and Dad by our noisy efforts to be quiet, she thought.
Sure enough, Diana had been bold enough to try to make flapjacks in Granny Zan’s kitchen—and to Zanna’s pleasant surprise, they were very good. They had a wonderful time over breakfast, chatting about Jake’s family and his memories of Christmas and how all three of them had grown up in families with completely different Christmas traditions.
“But everybody has stockings,” said Zanna, and they agreed. Which was the cue to go into the living room.
They were delighted to see that their stockings were stuffed so full they had had to be removed from the mantel and laid on the couch, and of course Jake thanked her and Diana teasingly cursed her for supplying them with enough calories to relieve a famine. Only when they got to the bottom of the stockings and found their real presents did they get serious.
“This is a family heirloom,” said Jake, but Zanna answered him with the speech she had prepared, which made him laugh and Diana growl until she laughed, and Jake said, “I’ll keep this, then, to remember what it’s like to love a proud woman.”
When Diana read the inscription inside The Bobbsey Twins, though, a couple of tears spilled down her cheeks. “Uncle Bug told me once that he used to read this to you when you were little. He didn’t think this copy still existed.”
“Still does,” said Zanna. “I hope it always will—but that it will be used, too.”
“It will,” said Diana, saying it like the most solemn of covenants.
Then Jake reached down under the tree and picked up a brightly wrapped box and handed it to her. “Diana didn’t know what we could bring you,” he said, “because you have everything and besides, you can’t buy art for Picasso, so we couldn’t get you anything edible or decorative.”
Zanna took the wrapping paper off meticulously, a habit she had begun in order to annoy her brothers during the present-opening ceremony, but which now she did because it simply felt like the right way to open a gift.
Inside it was a CD, but one with no cover and nothing written on it. “We recorded it ourselves,” explained Jake. “On the computer. You do have a CD player, don’t you?”
“I know all about CDs, and about ripping songs off the internet,” said Granny Zan. “You aren’t going to go to federal prison for making this for me, are you?”
“We didn’t rip it,” said Diana. “It’s us. Singing. We sang every Christmas carol we know. We’re not very good, but then if you picture us standing out in the snow shivering while we sing it, you’re standards will get lower and you’ll like it better.”
She hugged them both. “I will listen to it a dozen times today.”
“No you won’t,” said Jake.
“We have a bet that you can’t even get through it once,” said Diana. “We’re not professionals. We shouldn’t have tried this at home.”
“I am a musician,” said Jake, “but not a singer.”
“And I’m not a musician of any kind,” said Diana.
By this point, Zanna was at her stocking, feeling where there had been a present in it last night. There was nothing there.
“Sorry,” said Jake. “We didn’t think of filling your stocking. The CD might have fit, if I’d thought about it.”
Zanna looked at Diana, who blushed.
“Second thoughts?” asked Zanna.
Diana nodded.
“Any chance of third thoughts?”
Diana reached into her purse and took out a slim book and handed it to Zanna.
Jake was impressed. “Man, you put that in her stocking?”
“What I am,” said Diana, “is a very bad poet with delusions of grandeur.”
“What she is,” said Jake, “is the greatest living American poet, and she still won’t let me set any of her poems to music. My goal is to someday be good enough that she’ll let me.”
“But if this is the book where you keep your poems,” said Zanna.
“No,” said Diana. “It’s a copy. I copied them out for you, so you could read it.”
“And I bet you left out the really sexy ones.”
Diana gasped and Jake laughed and Zanna was delighted that she had struck home. Meanwhile, she had the book open and was thumbing through, looking at the titles.
“I like to think I write poems the way you paint,” said Diana. “Clearly. So people can understand what I’m talking about.”
And then Zanna came to a certain page and stopped. The title of the poem was, “Zanna’s Gift for Ernie.”
“Father told me about the drawing that you always had out for every Christmas,” said Diana. “He always said that you told him it was a drawing that a little girl once made for her brother as a Christmas present. I got Uncle Bug to tell me the whole story last summer.”
Diana walked to the mantel. “Is this it? The original?”
“Yes,” said Zanna. “Not much sign of talent in it, is there?” Then she looked back down at the poem and resumed reading while Diana and Jake studied the picture.
When they turned to face each other again, both Zanna and Diana had tears in their eyes. “Oh, my darling,” said Zanna, “how could you understand this, when you’ve never had any children of your own?”
“I was a child,” Diana answered. “And I have an imagination. And besides, I’ve known you my whole life. As Uncle Bug says, you haven’t changed a bit since you were little.”
“Well, you have just given me the best present I can remember,” said Zanna. “I’m so proud of you.” She looked at her proudly. “Just think. You’re kin of mine!”
“Well that’s how I feel about you,” said Diana, and they hugged and laughed. “I thought that maybe you’d like them. But I almost didn’t include that one poem, because it was so presumptuous of me.”
Zanna assured her that it wasn’t a bit presumptuous, and then, to Diana’s embarrassment, she read the poem aloud. It was the story of the little girl who had a present for her brother but no way to give it to him. The language was simple, the rhyming subtle, the flow of it like music.
“You see why I want to set it to music,” said Jake. “But then, music would be redundant, wouldn’t it?”
“Diana, you really need to marry a man who knows how to flatter you like that. I married one who let me continue my very time-consuming hobby during all the years when nobody wanted to hear about the kind of painting that I did. But you, I don’t think you’ll have to wait so long for the world to see your talent. And then all kinds of rock stars and movie actors will want to marry you, and I can promise you, this Jake fellow is better than any of them.”
It was nice to see that Jake could blush.
By noon they were on their way, a phone call to the highway patrol having ascertained that the pass was indeed clear and traffic was unobstructed. They ate cookies and biscuits all the way to Jake’s mother’s house, where the family—including three teenage siblings—had waited Christmas for them.
And as they drove that long road, Zanna, baking again in her kitchen, listened to their CD four times over, singing along on most of the
songs.
13
Three years later, late in November, just a few days after Thanksgiving, Diana and Jake received a package at their apartment in Milwaukee. The return address said it was from Suzanna Pullman.
“But that’s impossible,” said Diana.
“She must have mailed it before she died,” said Jake.
Granny Zan had passed away only a few days before. They would have gone to the funeral, but they couldn’t afford the flight, and Diana was too pregnant to risk flying anyway.
Even as Diana was opening the package, she knew what it was. “It’s Zanny’s gift to Ernie,” she whispered, and so it was, once the paper was off: A simple frame holding a meticulously drawn and completely unintelligible child’s drawing.
There was a note. “I have it memorized,” Granny Zan had written in her spidery hand. “And I have a feeling I’m only a day or two away from being able to give Ernie the version in my memory. So I have no more use for the physical version of it. There’d be no shortage of art collectors who’d fight over Suzanna Pullman’s earliest surviving work. But I wanted it to go to someone who loved what it meant, without thinking about what it would go for. You showed me that you understood a child’s heart, even if you couldn’t understand a child’s painting. So this is to you from little Zanna Pullman. It was you I was saving it for all these years, after all.
“Love, Granny Zan.”
Jake leaned over Diana’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek. “Such a reunion they’re having.”
“Oh, I hope so,” said Diana. “After they waited so long, God wouldn’t disappoint them now.”
“She had twice the life most people have,” said Jake.
“Well, of course,” said Diana. “She was living for two.”
Later, sitting on the couch, looking up at Zanna’s gift sitting on the mantel, Jake put his hand on Diana’s abdomen and said, “I don’t think he’d appreciate it if we named him Zanna.”
“There’ll be girls later,” said Diana, “and the name Suzanna will certainly belong to one of them.”
“But this boy?”
“Ernest isn’t a regular name anymore,” said Diana. “But maybe as a middle name?”
And that’s the name they gave him, meaning to call him Jacob, his first name. But long before he was old enough to learn his own name, they had fallen into the habit of calling him Ernie all the time. By the time he was three, there was indeed a little Zanna ready to grow up just behind him.
And every Christmas, their parents brought out a child’s drawing in a cheap little frame, waiting eagerly to tell their children what it meant, and whom they were named for, and how grief is just another name for love.
Afterword
Please wait. If you have just finished reading Zanna’s Gift for the first time, this essay is not a continuation of the story. If you would like to hold on for a while to the mood of Zanna’s Gift, then set this book aside for a few hours, a day or two. Then let this afterword have a small life of its own.
* * * * *
Zanna’s gift began in 1982 in South Bend, Indiana, when our not-yet-two-year-old daughter, Emily, began to draw.
Her four-year-old brother, Geoffrey, drew with magic marker, bold strokes of flamboyant color.
Emily wasn’t interested in the markers, or in crayons, or in pencils. She would only draw with ballpoint pen on white paper, and her drawings were not at all what we would have expected a child her age to produce.
Each drawing consisted of a closely filled-in dot—a tiny circle, meticulously round, and filled in with overlapping, swirling ink.
From each circle, a single line emerged. These lines usually curved, and they ranged from very short to an inch or two in length. When we asked little Emily what her drawings were, what they represented, she sometimes had an answer—“Car.” “Mommy.”—we could not tell in what way the picture represented anything at all. And as often as not, she had no answer; either she had not yet acquired the vocabulary to explain the drawing (though her language ability was pretty amazing for a child her age), or there was no explanation. It was what it was.
This drawing style persisted while we lived in South Bend. When we moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, I had a day job that took me away from home until after the kids were in bed at night. I lost track of Emily’s drawings—and all her other activities, during the six months I worked at Compute! Books. By the time I emerged from that job and returned to freelance writing at home, Emily was drawing like any normal child, and the dot-and-curl style never returned.
Emily did not grow up to be an artist. She has looked at those old drawings and has no idea what any of them meant, if they meant something at all. She is now an audiobook narrator, a writer, and the mother of three wonderful girls, each one as intriguing and self-motivating as Emily was herself at their ages.
So even though Zanna’s childhood art style was modeled on Emily’s, in no other way is Zanna modeled on my daughter. Zanna is her own self; the story followed where she led me.
That was one source of the story of Zanna’s Gift. The other was my cousin Shermy.
It happened that in about 1938, Orson Rega Card (for whom I was named) and his wife, Lucena Richards Card, moved, with their four children, into a house in the Avenues of Salt Lake City. Their new location was next door to the house where Clara Horne “Parkee” Park was raising her five children.
Parkee’s situation was something of a scandal in the neighborhood. Ever since the very public failure of the movie Corianton, the first feature film based on a Book of Mormon story, the producer, Parkee’s husband Daniel Lester Park, had found it convenient to say out of the state of Utah. There were lawsuits pending against him, and he found New York City a more comfortable place to live. However, he meant to return, and since he had no intention of selling the house he owned in the Avenues, that was where his wife and children remained.
For the record, the lawsuits arose from the fact that the investors in the film were almost all Mormons who knew nothing about the movie business. Above all, they did not understand that the budget of a movie includes the salary of the producer—in this case, Daniel Lester Park—so that even if the movie fails, the producer has been paid and, because he actually did the work and produced the movie, he does not have to give any of it back. The investors felt that this meant that Lester Park had defrauded them—taken their money and pocketed it.
Another reason for the lawsuits was that Lester Park was a promoter, and it’s likely that the investors had heard very little about the risks of funding a movie. Within Mormon culture, the feeling was, how could the movie fail? It was based on a local hit play of the same title, which was based on a story by a Mormon leader named B. H. Roberts, who based his fictional story on the letters from Alma to his sons in the Book of Alma, in the Book of Mormon. The film was so smiled on by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that they permitted recordings of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to be included in the soundtrack of the film.
The reasons for failure were varied and predictable. This was early in the age of the talkies, and many studios and producers were hiring stage directors to direct their movies. Stage directors were usually horrible at the job, because everything that worked on stage in that era failed miserably on screen (cf. Singin’ in the Rain). The result was a well-meant disaster of a film, without a moment of natural acting, and with a script that was written for the stage and which Lester Park was forbidden to alter.
Parkee and her children were left to bear the onus of Lester Park’s shattered reputation, and on top of that, Parkee was now, in effect, a single mother, and not a widow—which in those days carried a heavy burden of scandal and vicious speculation. She toughed it out, barely supporting her family by doing housekeeping for a relative who was a doctor.
The Park house was a big, fine structure, as befitted a movie producer. Inside, there wa
s almost no furniture; the family sat on wooden fruit crates and ate at a table consisting of boards stretched across more crates.
Rega and Lucena Card were the social opposites of the benighted Park family who lived next door. Rega was a grandson of Brigham Young, and his mother was the very prominent professor and Mormon leader, Zina Young Card. Lucena was the daughter of George F. Richards, the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, with two other apostles in the family.
In 1930s Utah, this meant they were both at the very peak of society; their wedding had been the event of the season. They expected their children to grow up to be Church leaders and prosperous in their careers. Above all, Lucena expected that her only daughter, Delpha, would marry even better than she had. Certainly her firstborn son fulfilled expectations by marrying the niece of a prominent Apostle.
Imagine her horror, then, when not one but two of her children found their spouses in the house next door. Lucena’s beloved Delpha married Parkee’s younger son, Sherman, a tall, good-looking lad with no particular career ahead of him. And Lucena’s second son, Willard (Bil), married the flamboyant red-haired opera-singer youngest daughter, Peggy.
Socially speaking, this was a marital disaster, and it took Lucena about thirty years to get over it. I know because she took her resentment out on my mother. My Uncle Sherm would not tolerate any nonsense from her; Lucena never wanted to quarrel with her daughter, Delpha; my father, Bil, had long since learned to tune out her criticisms; so this left only Peggy as a receptive target for Lucena’s bitter complaints. The result was that every visit to Salt Lake City would end with my mother shedding many bitter tears over the cruel things Lucena would say to her.
* * * * *
Naturally, we kids saw none of this—adults determined to be nasty can usually find ways to conceal it from distractable children, if they wish. Instead, whenever we visited Salt Lake City at the same time as Sherm’s and Del’s family, we frolicked madly all over the basement and back and front yards of Grandpa and Nana Lu’s house on Harrison Avenue. (We would not have dared to frolic on the main floor of the house; Nana Lu’s knick-knacks were not to be touched, nor would our parents tolerate any activity more rambunctious than a sedate walk from one couch or chair to another.)
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