Family Blessings (36 page)

"Because I'm younger?"

. "Partly." i He looked down at his hand in hers, its fingers opening and closing.

"Well, that I can't change. I'll always be younger, and there'll always be those who might accuse you of robbing the cradle. I know that."

A dejected silence fell. She put her hand on his shoulder. "I love my gift very, very much. Of all the people I've ever known in my life, I've never known one as intuitive as you. Not even Bill, and I mean that."

He looked up and gave her a three-cornered smile. "Well, that's a start anyway, isn't it?"

She, too, smiled. "Now I really do have to go back to work. May I use your bathroom first?"

"Sure."

She took her purse along, brushed her hair and applied fresh lipstick.

, When she came out he was getting her jacket from the closet. He held it while she slipped it on, then turned her by her shoulders to face him. Angling his head, he gave her a goodbye kiss, gentle and lingering.

When it ended she touched his mouth with the pad of one forefinger.

"Thank you for the lunch."

"You're welcome. Anytime."

"And for the tickets."

He only smiled in reply and kissed her finger.

"Christmas Eve," she said quietly, backing away. "Eleven o'clock.

I'll wait up for you." One last word came out in a whisper." Bye."

Chapter 13.

( CHRIS was scheduled to work both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day from three to eleven. That shift, on that particular night, was known to be unusually busy with emergency calls, though most of them were not true emergencies: The calls came from lonely people without friends or family who, rather than face Christmas Eve alone, manufactured ailments and went to emergency rooms. There they found people to talk to, someone to pay attention to them, human hands that touched and cared.

- Those on duty at the station had come to expect calls from old Lola Gildress, who smelled so bad they had to leave the squad car doors open for a while after dropping her off. Frank Tinker's gallbladder acted up . every year, too. He called every patrolman "sonny" and offered them his , snuffbox for a pinch, needed a pop can to spit into while he rode in the squad car and always asked them if they'd mind swinging down along Brisbin Street on their way to the hospital.

There, he turned rheumy eyes to a two-story house where he'd lived as a boy in a family of six, all of them gone now but him. Elda Minski called, too, as usual, and flounced out of her front door wearing a flea-bitten fox stole, vintage

1930, and a horrendous sequined turban on her bald head, eager to repeat her story of escaping the Russian Revolution and coming to America to sing opera on the same stages where Caruso and Paderewski had performed. The one they all waited for, though, was Inez Gurney, a sweet old woman curled over like a bass clef, who toddled out of her house taking baby steps--the largest she could manage carrying a tin of German butter cookies for anyone kind enough to wish her Merry Christmas.

Christopher answered Inez's call this year.

When he knocked on her door she was all ready and waiting, wearing a home-knit cap that tied under her chin and ancient rubber boots with zippers up the front and fur above the ankles.

The heels of the boots never left the ground when Inez walked.

He touched his hat visor and said, "Emergency call, Mrs. Gurney?"

"Gracious me, yes, but there's no need to hurry." Her S's whistled through false teeth that had outgrown her shrinking gums. "I'm actually feeling a little better. If you'll give me your arm, young man, and carry this . . .

He took her red tin with the painting of a holiday wreath on top, and escorted her down the path to the squad car.

"I thought the doctors might enjoy a taste of my German butter cookies." She said the same thing every year. "And, of course, you're welcome to sample them yourself. My-oh-my . .." She tried to look up at the sky but her osteoporosis wouldn't allow it.

"Isn't this some heavenly night though? Do you suppose we can see the Star of Bethlehem?"

"I imagine we can, but I wouldn't know which one it is. Would you?"

He stopped in the path to give her time. Again she tried to look up, bending her knees and angling her stiffold body. "No, I suppose not, but when I was a girl my papa taught me to find Cassiopeia and Orion and all the constellations. We lived on a farm near Ortonville, and my-y-y, those skies were big over the prairie. Have you ever been to Ortonville, young man?"

"No, ma'am, I haven't."

"It's farm country. Goose country, too. Why, in the fall those honkers would fly over in battalions, so many of them they'd fair block out the sun. And when they landed in a cornfield you could hear their voices bellering like blow horns clear over to Montevideo. Papa always shot one for Thanksgiving, and one for Christmas, too." They moved on t. toward the squad car, her hand on his arm, Christopher adjusting his stride to her baby steps while she told him about their Christmas dinners on the farm near Ortonville, her mother's sauerkraut stuffing and precisely what her mother had put into her beets to make them sweet and sour both, and how she herself had never mastered beets like her mother's.

At the squad car she needed help getting in, then swinging her legs to the front.

"Watch your purse," he said, pushing it up so he could slam the door.

Inside, he reported his whereabouts and destination to the dispatcher, and Mrs. Gurney asked, "Would you like to sample my cookies?"

"I certainly would. I'm a bachelor, so I don't get many homemade treats."

"I use only real butter, and cardamom. Some people think it's nutmeg, but it's not, it's cardamom. That's my secret." She had trouble opening the tin. Her fingers bent sharply from the end knuckle and her skin looked like mouse-spotted rice paper. "There we are," she said, when the lid finally gave.

He ate three cookies on the way to Mercy Hospital and told her he'd never tasted anything so delicious in his life, which put a smile on her wizened old face.

At Mercy, in the glaring white lights of the ER, he watched Mrs. Gurney being rolled away in a wheelchair with the tin on her lap, telling a young nurse about the cardamom and real butter she'd used in the cookies she'd brought for the doctors.

Back in his squad car, Christopher felt unutterably sad. The taste of the spice with the strange name cardamom--lingered in his mouth. The faint smell of mothballs seemed to linger in the car, too, and he had the thought that maybe Mrs. Gurney kept them in her bed to presene her very body. Poor old thing. Poor lonely old thing. Yet in spite of her loneliness, she had a need to give on Christmas Eve. What was more pitiful than a person with no one to give to?

It made him think of his own parents, who had been given two children and had squandered them both. What were they doing tonight in their dreary little apartment over there at Lincoln Estates? Was there a tree? A special supper? Gifts? Anything? And where was Jeannie?

Still shacked up in LA with her drug-pusher? Still fat and greasy-haired and living the reflection of their parents' lives?

He imagined what it might be like if Jeannie had stayed around here, graduated from high school, gotten respectably married and had a couple of kids. What would it be like at her house tonight?

Would he go there taking gifts to his nieces and nephews, and maybe help some brother-in-law put together toys for the kids' stockings? He tried to imagine his parents as grandparents, but the image wouldn't gel.

Lord, the city streets were so quiet on Christmas Eve. Cars at churches, but nowhere else. For once the bars were closed. Even the lighted Christmas decorations hanging from the lamp poles on Main Street looked forlorn.

He drove by Lee's house, but saw no activity. They, too, were probably at church.

He turned around in the circle at the end of Benton Street and cruised past her house once more, anxious for his shift to end so he could come back.

All the way back uptown his radio was still. At the west end of Main he kept going, right out onto the highway toward his apartment. Making sure his radio was on his belt, he went inside to his own refrigerator, opened the door and stood a long time contemplating the ham. It was wrapped in a mesh bag, must have weighed eighteen pounds, and one like it had been given in gratitude to every person on the staff who had responded to a call and saved the life of some rich people's son after he'd fallen into a swimming pool last summer.

There sat the ham.

Over at Jackson Estates sat his parents.

Reaching for the piece of meat he realized he wasn't so much different from Inez Gurney.

At Jackson Estates the hall smelled like stale cooked vegetables.

Its walls were crosshatched with black marks. The corners of the woodwork were worn white. Some doors had been patched where boots had kicked through them. Three candy wrappers and a rusty tricycle sat halfway along the dingy corridor. He knocked at number six and waited.

The Wise Men must have made it to Bethlehem faster than his mother made it to the door.

"Hi, Mavis," he said when she opened it.

"What do you want?"

"Just came to wish you Merry Christmas, that's all."

From inside, a gravelly voice yelled, "Who is it, Mavis? And hurry up and shut that goddamned door, will you? This place is built like a goddamn chicken coop!"

"Yeah, yeah!" she bellowed in a coarse whiskey-voice, "quit your bellyachin', you old sonofabitch." To Chris she said, "Well, come on in then, don't stand there in the hall while the old man chews my ass."

As he walked inside he heard his father coughing. The old man was sitting in a dilapidated chair with a metal TV tray beside him. A whiskey bottle and a shot glass shared the tray with a jar of Vicks, the T. V. Guide, a box of corn plasters and an empty metal plate from a TV dinner. Between the old man's throne and a similar arrangement four feet away, an artificial Christmas tree about a foot and a half high leaned like the Tower of Pisa, its permanently affixed lights looking hazy through the smoke from Mavis's cigarette, which still burned in an ashtray. She, too, was armed with a bottle and a shot glass. Her chosen libation, however, was peppermint schnapps. The room smelled of it, and the Vicks and the smoke, and the Salisbury steak gravy that congealed on the bottoms of their foil dishes.

"What do you say, Old Man?" Christopher said as he entered the sickening room and thumped the ham down on the adjacent kitchen table.

"Don't say nothin'. Got me a sonovabitch of a cold. What brings you around here all gussied up in your cop uniform? You wanna impress your ma and pa with how important you are?"

"Now, Ed, leave the boy alone," Mavis said, then burst into a fit of crackly coughing measuring about two packs a day on the nico-Richter scale.

"I brought you a ham," Chris told them.

"A ham . . . well, say, that's nice," said Mavis. "Here, have a drink."

"I'm on duty."

"Oh, that's right. Well, what the hell . . . just a little one.

It's Christmas."

"I don't drink."

"Oh, that's right."

"He don't drink, Mavis," the old man sneered. "Our holier-than-thou, gun-totin' upstanding citizen cop don't touch the sNffto his lips, do you, Officer?"

Why had he come here again? Why had he set himself up for the hurt these occasional breakdowns in common sense always brought?

"You ought to think about drying out," he said to Ed. "I'll help you anytime you want."

"Come here to deliver your Christmas sermon, did you? I dry out when I want to dry out! I've told you that before! Think you can bring a goddamn ham in here and drop it on the table and start preaching, well, just get your ass out!"

"Now, Ed," Mavis said. "Chris, sit down."

"I can't stay. There are still emergency calls coming in even though it's Christmas Eve. I just thought . .."

What had he thought? That they'd changed? Magically changed while marinating away here day after day in their self-made alcoholic stew Jesus, they were so foul and pathetic.

"Have you heard from Jeannie?" he asked.

"Not a word," replied Mavis. "You'd think she'd have the decency to send a card to her mother and dad at Christmas time, but no, not even that."

She didn't see it, didn't see any of it, not how unlovable they were, how undeserving of any consideration from their children.

It took more than starting a child in a womb and spewing it forth to make a person deserving of the title "parent."

He felt himself growing physically sick, looking at them.

"Well, listen . . . enjoy the ham. I've got to go."

Mavis came to show him out, he wished she'd have remained in her chair where he need not smell the stale schnapps and smoke on her breath, or let her filthy garments brush his, or see her nicotine-stained fingers on the doorknob.

Thankfully, she didn't touch him on-worse kiss his cheek as she sometimes remembered to do.

When the door closed behind him he bolted for fresh air, for the blameless, clear, star-studded night where somewhere people prayed in churches and gave each other gifts and sang carols around pianos.

And he thought, Lee, please, be up when I get there at eleven.

The Hillier Christmas tradition held that Orrin and Peg spend Christmas Eve at Lee's house and Christmas Day at Sylvia's. Lloyd came every year around noon of Christmas Eve day and stayed overnight so he'd be there in the morning for the opening of gifts. Janice, of course, was home from college, and to Lee's amazement, little Sandy Parker dropped in on Christmas Eve afternoon for about an hour, too. Though Lee was genuinely friendly to the girl, she found herself studying the fuzzyhaired, sloe-eyed brunette as the person with whom her son had recently begun practicing the rudiments of necking, and possibly-probably--petting.

The young people--dear, thoughtful hearts that they were knew that this holiday would have a great, sad hole at its heart where Greg had once been, and they stopped over, too--Nolan, Sandy, Jane and Kim.

Candlelight church service was held at six, and afterward Lee fed everyone oyster stew and cranberry cake with hot brandied sauce, their traditional Christmas Eve fare.