35
Ten years have passed. It is the day before Christmas, 1958, and again the survivors are returning to Whipple Castle. Henrietta has been busy for a week, opening and airing rooms, making beds, planning food and drink for the whole complicated operation. Sylvia Beaudette has been helping, but it is still quite a job, because the survivors have been multiplying. Cribs and bassinets have been brought from the various attics and set up in the old nursery, and in the process Henrietta has grown sad. Those dusty teeth marks in the enamel are messages from her youth, signals across time from her babies. Time passes. To the young it seems so right that old people are old, because the young want to grow up. But they will leam—are learning now, in fact. Wood is thirty-four, David thirty-two, Peggy and Kate both twenty-nine. She and Harvey are so old it doesn’t matter any more. Imagine moaning that you aren’t still in your twenties! In David’s last letter he spent at least a page sighing about age and rot.
Sally died in her sleep last year, at the age of eighty-two.
Christmas comes around just the same, and somehow the lights of Christmas reawaken the child magic, if only for moments. When Henrietta takes the strings of light bulbs from the box, the little bulbs swing down and hit each other with hard ticks, and she remembers all the years of tiny fright they might break. The little wire question-mark hangers for the decorations—has it been a whole year since she’s untangled them? A year is a moment, a blink of the eyes, and here you are again.
Outside it is gray, cold, with light veils of snow driven by the wind. She goes to stand in the parlor they never use, where it is chilly because the heat vents are nearly closed. It was from here she used to look at Wood when he was in that period of retirement ten years ago, when he sat quietly on the porch, studying his abominations. Now the cold boards seem to move as the snow swirls across.
The mad powers have been at war again, strutting and posing like brainless cocks, and will go to war again. She sighs because, among other things, the most powerful man in the world is a general. But there will be this Christmas anyway. One takes the seasons as they come.
She hears running feet, and manages to brace herself before Billy grabs her around the leg. “Hey, Grandma!” he says. He is six, brown-haired, with bright black eyes. He gives the impression that he owns her, owns the house and everything in it. “I know where the presents are,” he says.
She is about to tell him to stay out of the presents when she realizes the spirit in which he has confessed this knowledge. This will be their secret. His sister, who is eight, presumably doesn’t know, nor do his baby cousins.
Peggy comes in after him, and he ignores her. His mother is as unremarkable to him as the sun. She takes his hand and pulls him toward the door. “Come on,” she says, and he doesn’t object.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he says to Henrietta, ignoring the indignity of his forced removal.
“You and your secrets,” Peggy says, smiling wryly. She is seven months pregnant; Billy has explained this to Henrietta in remarkably technical terms. He is still a little confused about Daddy’s seed, because he has a window-box garden at home and he knows about seeds. A thoughtful look crossed his face when he came to that term. He doesn’t like vagueness, or secrets that aren’t his, and soon he will demand clarification.
Henrietta follows them out of the chilly room and shuts the door. Here in the hall are warmth and voices. She remembers Peggy Mudd, the little woods waif who came to them so long ago, who has repaid them a thousand times for whatever they gave her then. It has been their luck. She knows why Harvey let Bertram Mudd live there in the sugarhouse (she can admit that knowledge to herself now), and it is all so ironic that Harvey’s infidelity in some way brought Peggy to them—Peggy who took Wood from his limbo; they all saw it happen. Wood is now doing his residency in internal medicine at Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia, studying, he has confessed to Henrietta, the coinage of his obsessions. Because of the hospital’s location he has also become an authority on razor slashes, bottle cuts, stab wounds, contusions and other symptoms of human intercourse. Reality has substituted for his visions, and since it is only reality, he can put it in its place.
It is when he looks at his wife that his face evens out, smooths down, and he smiles.
Sally, who is eight, spies her in the hall and comes to take her hand. Sally is blond, with dark brown eyes and something of Wood’s squareness in the bones of her face. “Come on, Gram,” she says. “What are you standing here for?” Her level gaze and general sophistication are marred by a missing front tooth, a latecomer that has been much discussed, especially by Sally herself. The tooth is known to be up there in the gum, growing, she assures everyone.
She leads Henrietta down the hallway into the great room where the tree rises nearly to the ceiling. Past the false balcony it rises, glowing and twinkling, a perfect balsam fir. The room is sweetly scented. The primary colors that never seem gaudy on Christmas have warmed the heavy beams and panelings of Harvey’s great hall. At the top of the tree, small as a bird, the silver angel holds its hymn book before its pure little ceramic face. Written in the angel’s book are the words “Stille Nacht, Helige Nacht” and Henrietta thinks how their tree has always been more pagan than Christian, how little any of them have ever mused upon their nominal religion. Christmas has always been for them, for the Whipples. They have always had to come home to strut and clash, to touch each other again in the Christmas light.
Horace loved it so when the tree was up. Sadness comes over her, even among all this new life and laughter. David and Carol’s twins are sitting in their grandfather’s lap—two girl babies so pretty she is awed by their identicalness; how could such perfection be repeated? Gail, their three-year-old, is gentle and bright.
David’s life took a turn after Horace’s death. He went back to Chicago and tried to decide in which direction his life would go. Would he forget paint, words, those naive aspirations toward art and meaning, and go make money? He has told her about that first year, when just about all he did was play poker and drink. Letty spun off from the wastrel he had become; she is married, living in St. Paul. After that year, in which he nearly lost his GI Bill, he came back to Leah and married Carol Oakes, a nice girl who is lovely to her children, whose warmth seems to envelop and soften David’s prickly edges. He kept going to school until he became part of the school; he is now an assistant professor of English, whose dissertation on the metaphysical poets will be published next year. He will then become an associate professor. He is working on a book of what he calls “radical homiletics,” several parts of which have been published in the literary quarterlies. “What I want to do, Hanky,” he once said to her, “is to change the world and tell the truth at the same time. Do you think that’s possible?” In the parts of his book that she has read she hears strange echoes of her own thoughts; but he seems to want to change things she never thought of changing. He works at his craft with the intense optimism of the student he has decided always to be. Around him in his profession he sees men whose cynicism, so brilliant it seems to arc, to ionize the air in little sparks and flashes, signifies that they are dying of…sloth. In his wallet he keeps a plastic-protected photograph of Horace, who, he says, is trying to tell him something. “Aside from Carol and the children, who keep me irritated and alive, Horace’s cryptic message keeps me serious.”
Whatever that means. To Henrietta he seems happy enough. She senses that he is never flippant—perhaps that is Horace’s message to him.
The laughter of children chimes in the room, blue, green, red, yellow, needle-silver—the colors of their voices. She stands among them being a grandma. The title will always startle her.
David has taken Harvey’s new Cadillac to the station in Wentworth Junction to pick up Kate. She had intended to fly from New York to the new regional airport, but weather grounded her plane in Boston and she had to take the train the rest of the way. Kate is an editor again, this time in a small publishing house. She does well, for
though she has become exotic to Leah, in New York she is considered to possess the mythical virtues of the New Hampshire hills and mountains, which perhaps in a measure she does possess. She tests for what is felt. Wayne Facieux introduced her to that world, and they are still friends. He no longer writes poetry; his main occupation would seem to be to know everyone of importance in the literary world. His style has changed; he has been known to wear spats and a bowler hat. He is on the editorial staff of a small magazine known for its brilliantly cutting reviews. A strange, thorny bird, he seems to have many literary jobs, many projects going.
Kate’s marriage, to a man she prefers not to talk about, ended without children or friendship, and it has left her with a certain brittleness and hesitation toward marriage itself. Her life, she says, is exciting.
The weather is closing in even more, now. The snow has thickened, and the wind has stilled, as though quieted by the heavy flakes. In the white dusk Kate and David arrive. The short walk from the garage has bedecked them with white flakes and jewels.
The children have been waiting for Aunt Kate, and they run to her, yelling her name as she comes in. David comes along behind with her suitcases—one filled with presents. She is beautiful to the children, with her golden hair and bright loving gasps of pleasure. Her eyes shine, her clothes are touched with mysterious hints of silver and gold. To them she is not exactly human, she is the glittering Queen of Winter, the Kind Witch of the North whose boreal power is the paradox of ice and Christmas. Gail, Billy and Sally take her to see the twins, and it becomes a ceremony that hushes them all. She shines down upon their symmetries and they stare brightly up at her, her glitter in their eyes. She embraces Carol, telling her with the power of prophecy what treasures she possesses. David, with an uncharacteristic, or perhaps seasonal, burst of emotion, embraces both Carol and Kate and tells them he does not deserve them, that they are his talismans, his cisalpine legions.
Everyone is here, and the tree, miraculous and silent, rises above them.
Later, after supper’s microcosmic calamities, the babies are put to bed and the children settled before the television, where A Christmas Carol is to be performed. “Bah, humbug!” Harvey roars, but he decides to watch it with them even though he knows he’ll cry like a baby over Scrooge’s reformation.
The others settle around the tree. Sally De Oestris is not here, nor is Horace. They all remember the Christmas Peggy came to live with them, the Christmas Horace fell into the tree—balls, bulbs, bells and tinsel in mad confusion, the tree’s stability shaken. David, with his propensity for ceremony, proposes a toast to those who are no longer with them. In sherry they drink to Sally and to Horace.
Wood puts down his sherry glass and looks at his wife. She smiles at the Whipples, and as he sees her smile in profile, her lips from this angle are totally new, a discovery to him. He must touch her, so he puts his hand on her belly to see if he can feel the baby move, or the beat of the little heart.
Peggy feels her husband’s hand on the beat of the heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THOMAS WILLIAMS was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1926, went to New Hampshire when he entered high school and-except for Army service in Japan and graduate work at the Universities of Chicago, Iowa and Paris —has been living there ever since. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Evening Post. One was awarded an O. Henry Prize; others have been included in Best American Short Stories. His novel, Town Burning, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1960, and his volume of short stories, A High New House, received the Dial Fellowship for Fiction in 1963. He has also been a Guggenheim fellow and was recently awarded a Rockefeller grant for 1968-69. He now lives in Durham, New Hampshire, with his wife and two children and is at work on a new novel, The Hair of Harold Roux.
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