In Leah, on Christmas Eve, it snowed all evening from the shuttered, windless dark. The hills seemed to close in, and the snow sifted down upon the four main roads that led from the town, softly crowding Leah in towards itself. Though the plow trucks were busy, with their distant rumbles and dimly flashing lights, they seemed insignificant and lonely in the measureless white. The Cascom River was frozen over, and it, too, built up with snow, except for black water splatting on black ice below the Cascom Woolen Mill dam. The train from Concord, called “the Peanut,” had stopped to let off passengers and mail, and now it huffed its way down the slow grade along the Cascom River toward the Connecticut River, where it would pass over a black iron bridge into Vermont. The passengers it had let off were mostly soldiers and sailors, and these took one look at the snow that hadn’t even been cleared from the small parking area beside the station, shouldered their duffel bags and trudged off into the town, each taking his own azimuth across the white. The other passengers went quickly into the small waiting room and stood by the potbellied stove, thinking about what to do. Billy Grimes’ taxi, the stationmaster informed them, was following the plows to Northlee with five people aboard, and wouldn’t be back for at least an hour, if then, because Billy had mentioned going home to have the tree. “And so am I,” the stationmaster said, putting on his overcoat and galoshes. His car had been put up for the war, he added, or he’d give them a ride. And so they all trudged off, grunting and leaning, toward their destinations.
The Town Square was deserted except for the green, red and blue Christmas lights strung from the lampposts, and other lights Strang through the blue spruce. The loudspeaker over the Town Hall doorway had gone dead except for an occasional amplified crack of static; Mrs. Box, the town clerk’s secretary, had gone home and left the phonograph amplifier on.
In their apartment over Trask’s Pharmacy, across the hall from the Trasks themselves, Wayne Facieux and his mother looked at the tree Wayne had decorated. All the bulbs were blue, and the only other decorations Wayne had allowed this year were tin-foil icicles. He was pleased by the tree’s cool, luminous deliberateness, its ethereal, un-Christmas purity. The whole room, filled as it was with his mother’s tasteless gimcracks and cheap maple furniture, gleamed a stylish and original blue.
Across the hall, Mr. and Mrs. Trask and Prudence sat before their bright, conventionally various tree. The radio softly gave them carols, but something was wrong, because for long moments none of them moved, and their eyes were too grave and bright. The dinner dishes had been done too quickly, and though it was their custom to open presents on Christmas Eve, and they had opened them, no tissue paper, paper bells and red ribbon were scattered about on the flowered carpet. Mrs. Trask, who had just finished picking everything up, sat with the crushed tissue in her lap, wondering, with anxiety she could not control, or keep from inflicting upon her husband and daughter, upon what dark battlefield, among armed and violent men, her son’s tender body lay in danger.
Across the square, where the great houses stood on their wide lawns, Mr. Gordon Ward, Sr., stood before a bowl of eggnog and shook into its creamy surface the last drop from a bottle of bourbon. “Whoopee!” he cheered softly to himself. “Whoopee doopee doo, and a twenty-three scaroo!” He was a big man, as violently red-haired and green-eyed as his son—who was enjoying Christmas at Camp Blanding, Florida, and thus, presumably, not in trouble. The Burtons had dropped over from next door, and everybody, even Mrs. Ward, had about the same glow on. Screeches of laughter came from the living room, and he was about to carry the silver bowl triumphantly to their waiting appetites.
A few blocks from the square, up Union Street, the Potters’ high white house glowed cheerfully, with red electric candles in all the front windows. In the living room was their wide-spreading tree, deep green and silver and red and blue. Lois and her parents sat in the handsome room before the lighted tree and a small fire of white birch logs. Her mother and father sipped dark sherry while they waited for the ceremonial Christmas visit of Sally De Oestris. Wood would be driving her around tonight, and Lois, looking bright and beautiful in a new knit dress, silk stockings and heels, waited for him.
Out on the flats toward Northlee, at Sam Davis’ farm, Susie sat at the kitchen table, staring off into space somewhere above the sink. She had just come in from helping with the milking, having left her father as he lowered the heavy milk cans into the milk-house well. She could still smell the barn on her left shoulder, where she had pressed against the warm cows. Mrs. Gamer sat in her chair with her black afghan over her shoulders, knitting, and the radio on its single-board shelf played, and had played, so many Christmas carols Susie had stopped identifying each one. The tree was in the parlor, but it was too cold in there to sit.
For long stretches she could forget about the scandal. People seemed to treat her about the same. The biggest change was leaving high school. Though she might have done that anyway, it seemed a direct result of what had happened that night. Most of the hurt was the betrayal. Before that Gordon had been so nice to her, and she’d really believed with all her heart, that first time she’d let him, that he loved her. And the second time, too, in his own house. But then he hadn’t even looked at her for a month, and the next time he asked her out that thing happened. He had planned it. She couldn’t seem to understand how anyone could lie like that. How could he have lied to her, straight to her face, when she had loved him? It made her into nothing.
In that part of the Whipples’ barn that used to be the entrance to the horse stalls, and was now the garage, Wood jacked up the rear wheels of the car and put on the tire chains. David and Horace were just finishing up the shoveling, although the snow fell so thickly they’d have to do it all again, probably, after the presents in the morning. It would give them all good appetites for the turkey, anyway.
Sally De Oestris’ old Filipino chauffeur had died two years ago, and since then it had been Wood’s job to drive her around on Christmas Eve as she delivered presents to relatives, friends, old families she kept her eye on and poor families she kept her eye on—one of her kind, sarcastic, twinkly little ice-blue eyes. He’d fill the trunk and the back seat up with Sally’s packages, then help her—in fact lift her—into the front seat, hand her her canes and wait while she arranged her fur coat, her fancy pocket-book, her hat and veil, and they would be off on their rounds.
When he got to her house this night, he had to bash through the bank the plow had raised, grind into her driveway and shovel a path from the car to her front entrance. All the lights in her house seemed to be on, and her uniformed maid, Sylvia Beaudette, a dark-haired young woman whose husband was in the Army Air Corps, was piling the packages in the front hall.
“Merry Christmas, Sylvia,” Wood said.
“Merry Christmas, Wood. Sally’ll be down in a minute, if the elevator works.” Sally’s elevator, a little seat that ran slowly up a slot in the stairwell, following the stairs, had never failed to work, as far as he knew, but nobody ever referred to it without this reservation.
Sylvia, evidently under orders, went out toward the dining room and came back with a glass of sherry on a salver. He took it, and Sylvia took away the salver. The dark, imported cream sherry was Sally’s Christmas wine. No one knew how much of it she had left in her wine cellar, but it couldn’t be bought any more. Her custom was to send a bottle of it to the houses where she intended to disembark from the car.
He sipped the smooth sherry and looked around at the trophies of Sally’s travels. A brilliant Japanese wall hanging in silk, of a stylized woman in a red kimono, hung on the wall to the left of the dining-room arch. The woman played a small three-stringed instrument with a pick half as big as the instrument itself. It had always fascinated him that the tiny teeth in her delicately pouting little mouth were black. It occurred to him that he had known these objects from Japan—the lacquer bowls and tables, Samurai swords and sake sets—since he was a child, and had never, and couldn’t quite even now, associate them with the bucktoothed little caricatures of men he might be fighting soon. A shiver came at this thought.
A humming and clanking, such as an old cog railway might make, invaded the hall. It was the elevator, and soon, rounding the upper spiral of the stairs and descending slowly, came Sally, perched bright and glittering as a little bee queen. In a shimmery blue dress, twinkling and tinkling with bangles as bright as her bright blue eyes, she slowly descended.
“Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” she said in her deep voice. Her voice always astonished Wood, after not having heard it for a while, but after a few words he got used to it again. And every time he saw her she seemed a little smaller and more bent over, but just as bright and eager, always grinning in a fiercely pleased way, like the Cheshire cat in Tenniel’s illustration.
Before they left, after he’d filled the car with packages, she gave him an A gas coupon. She rarely used her car any more, and when she did she hired a man to drive it. Her car was a 1937 Ford phaeton with a specially built, enclosed passenger compartment behind the open chauffeur’s seat, and a little nautical porthole on each side. Sally had explained once that she liked the 1937 Ford’s looks, and also its mechanical, rather than hydraulic, brakes. She was surprisingly technical-minded about things (although Wood disagreed about the Ford’s cable brakes). Once, when she’d volunteered that she’d flown in an open-cockpit airplane from Paris to London in 1920, he asked her what kind of plane it was, and she explained without hesitation that it was a Bristol “Brisfit” two-seater fighter plane, and she’d sat in the gunner’s seat. The gun had been removed, but the pilot had shown her patches in the wings that covered German bullet holes.
When they were cruising slowly down Bank Street in the quiet snow, with the tire chains gently thumping, Sally said, “I suppose you resent having to cart me around like this, but these little ceremonies are all we old women have left, you know.”
“I don’t mind,” Wood said.
“Maybe you don’t,” she said, turning to look at him. Her neck didn’t turn sideways, and if someone spoke to her from the side she had to move her whole body around. “We’ll stop in at the Potters’, and you won’t mind that,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve explained to the rest that I can’t get out of the car this year. This old body’s too hard to manipulate these days.”
He felt relieved.
“That pleased you, didn’t it?” she said. “I don’t have to imagine you’d rather fool with Lois Potter (my, isn’t she getting to be a beauty?) than a seventy-year-old bag of bones like Sally De Oestris.”
It was hard to see through the windshield and the constantly clogging wipers, but few other cars were out, so he didn’t have to worry about them. He got stuck once down on Water Street, where one of Sally’s poor families lived in a railroad tenement, but with a little shoveling got out again. Finally, after two hours, after explaining to everyone who wanted to give him a drink that Sally was out in the car, and after her friends, relatives and the people she kept an eye on had come out in the snow to greet her and kiss her through the car window, they had made all the calls except for the Potters’.
“It’s quite a night,” Sally said. “It’s a night for a sleigh. I remember when we used sleighs all winter, nearly, when they didn’t plow the snow at all.”
“They didn’t?”
“They rolled it down flat and hard. They used six-horse teams, and great rollers weighed down with cut granite blocks. That was exciting. I used to ride up on one of those rigs with Mr. Jason Campbell, captain-elect of the Cascom River Volunteer Fire Company.”
The snow melted on the hood of the car, and the heater fan buzzed as they came back around the square. The Christmas lights were dim in the falling snow, and only one lane had been plowed on any street.
Mr. Potter had shoveled a two-shovel-wide corridor for Sally, and Wood crunched into the bank as far as he could, climbed around and repaired the corridor with his shovel before lifting Sally out. Mr. Potter, calling “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” came out to guide Sally and her canes. Wood followed with the packages, his overshoes full of snow, and they all entered the suddenly warm, dim and cheerful house. Lois, her eyes bright, came and took the packages out of his arms so he could take off his coat and overshoes.
“Merry Christmas, Wood,” she said shyly and softly. She came back to hang up his coat. As she turned, her soft black hair swirled, her slim legs flashed silk, and she was so pretty and dressed up, his legs grew weak. No, the weakness was because this lovely girl had made herself up just for his unworthy eyes.
They turned and entered the living room. Sally was enthroned in the sort of high, straight chair she found most comfortable, and Mr. Potter held her fur coat, melting crystals of snow gleaming on the long, dark tippets of fur. They had been laughing and chattering. “A white Christmas!” Mrs. Potter had just said. But now they turned, and were silent as they looked at Wood and Lois. Lois put her arm through his, and he felt her tremble. Sally’s bright gaze narrowed as she smiled, and just perceptibly she nodded. Upon Mr. Potter’s long, affable face was an expression almost of pain. But it was Mrs. Potter’s face his eyes found and then jumped away from. She smiled, a speculative, encompassing smile, prideful and dark. He read everything in her naked face. She saw her virgin daughter with a man.
Peggy sat on a wicker stool next to the fireplace and stared at the lighted tree. The Whipples’ tree was the grandest of all. At the very top, a delicate silver angel with real blond hair and a brilliant gold halo stood just below the ceiling, singing from a hymn book that was a real little leather-bound book, with real words in it. They were in a foreign language, though, and the letters were all so full of curlicues and bows she hadn’t been able to read them. The angel had gone on the tree at the very last, and she had been the one to stand at the top of the stairs and hand it to Wood. He had stood on the stepladder, and she had put the fragile angel into his strong hand. He’d just been able to reach the top, and he stretched so far his shirt came out of his pants and she’d caught a glimpse of the blue band of his shorts. When he finally crimped the angel’s wire holder with his fingers, to make it stand straight, he looked down at her and smiled so warm and triumphant a smile—just to her, because he and she had been the only ones to handle the angel—she became warm herself, and so happy she could name her happiness. Then she smiled, in turn, down at Horace, who had been allowed to steady the ladder. She felt part of them all, being in that chain of warm regard.
Now it was Christmas Eve. The concert had been called off because of the snow, and instead the choir was to sing on the evening of the twenty-seventh in the Congregational Church. Wood hadn’t come back with Sally De Oestris, David and Horace were still out shoveling snow, and Kate and Mrs. Whipple, with elaborate kindness and goodwill, had shooed her out of the kitchen and told her to go entertain Mr. Whipple. “He likes you, you know,” Mrs. Whipple said.
She knew that was true. Mr. Whipple tended to yell a lot, and he pretended to start arguments with her, but she could see he didn’t mean it in a bad way. He sat at his big table, drinking sherry. Mrs. Whipple had already told him twice not to drink it all before Sally De Oestris arrived.
“She’s a good old bitch, and she’ll understand,” he’d answered.
Now he looked at her mock-fiercely and said, “So you’re going to sing in the choir, eh?”
“Yup,” she said, consciously impudent.
“All those yowling adenoids! Thank God I don’t have to hear it!”
“You ought to come hear us. We’re doing Handel’s Messiah.”
“Oh, God!” he said, “spare us poor sinners!”
Henrietta stood at the sink, where she and Kate were finishing up the last few odds and ends of pans, dishes and silverware. In a way she looked forward to Sally De Oestris’ annual visit, although she hadn’t liked Sally at all when she and Harvey were first married. She had sensed immediately that she was being patronized and “understood,” that Sally was speaking to her as if to a hill farm girl. Of course she had always realized that Harvey belonged to a different class—she’d known that long before she seriously considered marrying him, when she began to learn the different vocabulary. But ever since she was a little girl she’d had a strange streak in her that made her quite unlike Sally’s idea of a hill farm girl. She read odd books, and she was something of a scholar.
Harvey and Sally might laugh when she pronounced Dostoevsky “Dostóyvsky,” but she had never heard anyone pronounce the name, even in high school. They knew how to pronounce the man’s name, but she had read not only Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, which they both vaguely allowed they’d read long ago in college, she’d read The Idiot and Notes from Underground. And she’d read all kinds of books. She’d read Ruskin and Cardinal Newman, Jerome K. Jerome, Stephen Leacock, Sir James Frazer and Bret Harte. She had no system, at first, only a dictionary and her curiosity. She read A Tramp Abroad as eagerly as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and that as eagerly as Anthony Adverse. If books on economics and forestry and ornithology came to her hand, she took them home and read them. The two ladies who ran the Leah Public Library thought she was quite odd, but they would let her, at the ages of twelve and thirteen, take twice as many books home as they would the other children.
She still read a lot, but with a certain knowledge of categories now. She knew the difference between Reader’s Digest and The Atlantic, or The Virginian and The American. It made her a little sad, this new knowledge, because she no longer read with that sense of unpredictable discovery.
Her politics were not Harvey’s at all. She voted for Roosevelt in 1932, and she had in 1936 and 1940, and she would again too, if he ran for a fourth term. This drove Harvey mad, because he couldn’t change her mind. And after Sally De Oestris had bumped into certain hard areas of knowledge and opinion in her, their attitudes toward each other changed very quickly. Sally was an odd character too—a rich girl who hadn’t done what was expected of her, who had taken her freedom literally. She’d had lovers and never married. One of them had been a general in a revolution, and Sally had stood beside him and seen him order the death of a president. Later the general himself was taken and shot, and Sally took refuge in the American embassy. All this had happened before Henrietta was born, but she went to the college library in Northlee and found a history of those events. She found the general’s name there, and with a sense of real shock, because she thought she’d believed Sally, found her name in a footnote: “…a wealthy American girl, Sally Destrous[?], friend of General Aranpo.” Sally had told her about it with all the manifestations of truth Henrietta had always recognized and respected. It was simply the subject matter that could not, for all of Sally’s authority, pass into Henrietta’s mind as truth. And yet there it was. Sally Destrous; it could have been no one else, and she was shocked more by the discovery of her real disbelief than she was by the truth of the story.
Although it was not in Henrietta’s nature to so casually mention things in her past, Sally would have found some of her experiences hard to believe too. That her father was partly eaten by pigs, for instance, or the winter they lived mostly on wild vegetables, tubers and johnnycake, when she had come down with what she now believed to have been either a vitamin deficiency or an allergy to some of that food—apples, pigweed, burdock, canned fiddleheads, dandelion greens, Jerusalem artichoke, hemlock tea and all the rest—and came out with sores and runny pus all over her body, so that she smelled awful, and most likely nearly died. The Overseer of the Poor brought them milk and flour. Their three cows had been condemned because of tuberculosis, and a bear had killed the two heifers in the orchard. They burned gray birch that winter, green and unsplit, and they were as close to the bone as most people ever got. They had no tree that Christmas because her grandfather was too tired to find one and drag it home. Her father sat in the kitchen, holding his soiled bandaged stumps with fearful care, and gave great breathless sobs because of his worthlessness and frustration. Of all the Christmases of her childhood, that was the one she remembered most clearly.
One miraculous thing happened on Christmas Eve, and at least one close shave. Tom came home after nearly a year of God knew where—that was the miracle. Kate heard a scrabbling, thumping noise at the back door and opened the inner door. There in the small window of the storm door was a cat’s face staring at her, right into her eyes. Tom had climbed up the storm door by sheer claw, as he always did, and looked in. She opened the door and he dropped down, walked in, twitched his tail, thumped his head on her ankle as of old, jumped up on the stool and said “Miaow.”
For a moment she was confused about his absence. Had he really been gone? There he was, looking no different. His eyes were as green, his gray tiger coat as smooth and neat as ever, his gums as pink. He licked a paw, combed his brow with it, and said “Miaow” again.
“Tom!” she said, and ran into the living room, where David, Horace, Peggy and her mother and rather sat around the tree. “Tom’s back!” To prove her point he followed her in, his tail up straight, each paw putting itself down with his old lion’s authority, in which there always seemed to be some distaste for the texture of the carpet. He went straight to David, who sat in a high-backed oak and leather chair, jumped up on his lap and rolled over, exposing his fleecy white belly. When David scratched his stomach, Tom grabbed David’s hand with his front paws and gently bit it as he went clawlessly through the gutting motions with his hind paws. There was no doubt that he was back, and that he didn’t care to discuss his absence, or to allude to it by any way of strange behavior. He had been gone, they finally decided, about eight months.
“Where the hell have you been?” Harvey asked him. “Where the hell have you been, you murdering nightwalker?” Tom looked over at him and slowly closed his eyes.
“He’s got one little souvenir of his travels,” David said, rolling the fur away from a long scar on his flank. Tom batted his hand away and jumped down.
“He’s been out on the tomcat trail,” Harvey said. “He’s lucky that’s all he’s got.”
“When Wood and Sally come, let’s not mention it,” Kate said. “Let’s see what Wood says!”
Tom walked over to where Horace was sitting on the floor with his back against the paneling. He sat down in front of Horace, looked at him and yawned fearsomely, exposing all his needlelike white teeth and the pink cavern of his throat.
Horace shivered and looked away from those weapons. He wished Wood were back. He had never understood the cat, never understood why the others all seemed to like it, and to kid with it, as his father just had, about its hunting prowess. “What a killer!” David had often said proudly.
The cat went to the dining-room archway and rubbed itself in mock affection against the molding. “Miaow!” it said, and Kate rushed out to get it a saucer of milk.
Peggy sat next to the fire, licking a peppermint candy cane to make it last. She saw Horace shiver when the cat yawned at him, and she thought she knew how he felt. One night almost a year ago she woke up hearing the shrill death screams of a rabbit. Over and over the high “No! No!” broke out of the darkness, then died down, then was torn out again, pitiful and hopeless with tenor. What could a rabbit call to for help? That cry was for no reason but pain and despair. It took a quarter of an hour before the cries came no more. In the morning by the outhouse she found a dead coney rabbit, its spine bare where a cat, or something, had eaten out its live backstrap muscles. The Whipples’ fondness for Tom had always been a little strange to her too, and it made them all somehow larger than life, even somewhat frightening and heroic, as though they could look straight at death without even a shudder.
Wood and Sally De Oestris finally arrived, and Sally came slowly in on her canes, her deep voice merrily booming. Her fur coat was removed and she was ensconced in the high oak chair David vacated for her, and given a glass of sherry. She shook out her beads and adjusted herself and the brilliant folds of her blue dress, grinning all the while. She noticed Peggy and said, “Margaret Mudd! What’s this? A little Wandervogel come for Christmas?”
Peggy nodded shyly, and Sally said, “I knew it. Wood told me in time to include something for you, Peggy Mudd. You’ll find it under the tree in the morning.” She looked fiercely about her and said, “Well!”
Wood and David had brought her packages in from the car, and now, as was their custom on Christmas Eve, they began with great mock secrecy, and lies as to which present was for whom, to put all the presents under the tree.
“A case of Lifebuoy for Kate!” David said, tucking a package far back under the tree. “Beee-oooh!” he said, imitating the radio.
“The keys to Davy’s new Plymouth convertible!” Kate said as she came back from the hall closet with one tiny box in her hand.
Peggy sat basking in their energy. Mr. Whipple said something to Sally and she roared, though her white head barely moved. Her carefully set white hair glinted all the colors of the tree. Mrs. Whipple took a glass of sherry and came to sit on another wicker stool next to Peggy.
“I saw another present for you in the hall closet,” she whispered, and her hand came over to lie warmly on Peggy’s arm.
Soon the presents were all partly hidden beneath the tree. Their shiny bows and flowered wrappings could be seen, precious and powerful shapes in there in the colorful dusk. Even she had bought presents for them all, because of Wood, who’d insisted on lending her five dollars. He’d ordered her to take the five dollars. When she said she couldn’t, he said she must, and frowned at her from such a stern height she trembled, and couldn’t refuse. She bought Wood a wallet, the most expensive thing, handkerchiefs for Kate and Mrs. Whipple, a boondoggle and steel key ring for David, a pair of knit gloves for Horace and, in consultation with Mrs. Whipple, a little pipe-reaming tool for Mr. Whipple, who occasionally smoked a pipe. All this came to four dollars and eighty-five cents. In spite of her happiness at having bought these things for all the Whipples, it seemed like such a lot of money she could never pay it back.
Just then Tom, evidently having finished his milk, stepped quietly into the center of the room, sat down, stuck one hind leg out straight as a Nazi saluting Hitler, and began to lick himself. Peggy watched Wood, and then, as Wood’s eyes opened in surprise, she turned to Kate. Kate was bubbling inside and grinning—the only girl Peggy knew who could make faces and still look pretty.
“Look who came home for Christmas!” Kate said.
“It’s Tom!” Wood said.
“Back from the wars, with a Purple Heart,” David said.
Mrs. Whipple’s hand tightened on Peggy’s arm, and Peggy looked up at her. She was staring unhappily at Wood. Was it what David had said about the war? Wood was going into the Army soon, going away to danger. Suddenly her heart gave a great push, almost as if she’d lost her breath. How could he go from this house out there where her father was made sick with fear of the shells and bullets? It was more dangerous for Wood. Someone would take care of her father and tell him what to do, but Wood would choose to do what other people wouldn’t dare to do. For him the war would be too dangerous. He was too valuable, and somehow he shouldn’t be allowed to go. With this thought, which seemed to carry in it all the truth in the world, she saw at once the horror and injustice of the war. Nothing could be done about it. Wood was not going of his own free will, even though he might give that impression because he was resigned to it. It was by force that he had to go, and that force came suddenly right into this room in spite of the beautiful tree and these Whipples who were being happy and good to each other. These moments of Christmas now became, in her new knowledge, infinitely pitiful and valuable.
Not hearing their talk, now, she began to make an accounting of this place in time, as if for future reference: the few pretty Christmas candies on waxed paper, Kate’s beauty and grace, the angel singing its unknown hymn from the top of the tree, the dark strength of the high room looming over them, but now brushed gently with the kindly light of Christmas. There in the corner sat Horace with his blunt awkwardness, and in the middle of the room Sally De Oestris glittered like a funny little queen on her throne, while Mr. Whipple drank and joked like a slightly dangerous clown. Mrs. Whipple, who was always kind but sometimes distant, as if she’d been called away in her mind to some other place; David, who said quick things that might be funny yet might be cruel. And Wood, whom she loved with all her heart and because of this deeply feared. He reminded her of…God. From across the room his great warmth pressed against her with nearly as tangible a force as the fire at her side.
Horace watched Peggy through his crisp new glasses, seeing to his horror that tears were in her eyes. She was crying. He had to do something for her right now. Later, after all the excitement caused by this flash of need on his part had died down, he could not remember the idea of urgency at all; he merely acted. If only he could have made one intermediate step of some sort between the thought and its translation into action—if only he could leam to do this—such disasters might not always happen to him.
He did not remember getting up from the floor. As to what he intended to give Peggy, he was never certain; the nearest real object might possibly have been a candy cane hanging on a branch of the tree near a blue ball with a red light deeply refleeted in its delicate, complicated panorama of reflections. But more than this, perhaps, was a kind of wonderful aura he crazily thought he might grasp out of the very air next to the tree—its calmness, its serenity before which they had all lost their cruelty—and bring this in his arms to Peggy. But then everything turned into slow motion; their horrified faces passed his dazed regard as slowly as great masses gather momentum. He had stepped on the cat, whose scream contained all kinds of judgments and bad information. He stepped off the cat into what seemed to be a slow yet irresistible wind. Their faces turned like moons, like the Herpes watching his total responsibility. He could make no explanations. His next step would, he realized, be upon a green-wrapped box he happened to know contained a present for his mother—a fragile lamp for her sewing table. So he did not take that step, and the wind, or whatever force it was, moved him toward the tree. Branches delicately touched his cheeks; lights and the glowing balls, icicles and strings of tinsel moved like galaxies toward and past his still wondering eyes as he passed remorselessly out of the room and into nightmare, the final, totally familiar crash and glassbreak of disaster.
Later, after Horace’s groaning cries had stopped, the tree had been set straight again and the broken decorations picked up and swept up, they all sat quietly and listened to carols. Henrietta had her arm around Horace, and quieted him. Harvey searched for a way to make it less than it was, but could find no way to make it funny and small. The boy’s sheer terror had even frightened him, and his first ironic comment now echoed cruelly in his ears. “God bless us, every one!” he’d said in the first shocked silence before Horace bawled.
Peggy sat on the other side of Horace and held his hand. David and Kate still looked rather stunned.
Silent night, holy night,
All is calm, all is bright…
the radio voices sang. After a while Kate made hot chocolate, and the disaster faded into less than tragedy. After a long time, when Horace was even seen to smile, all their faces instantly imitated his.
There were few memories of Christmases, just memories of Christmas. In the Whipples’ castle the great tree of one year faded into all the trees of all the years. But they would remember more clearly than most the Christmas Horace fell into the tree. The snow would stop, the roads would open out again from their house and from Leah, and the colors of Christmas, its familiar intimacies, its quality of truce, would change into the celebration of someone’s return. In their memories this would be the last real Christmas of childhood.