Chapter 12
IT IS ALMOST CHRISTMAS. My hands are cupped around my eyes as I look through the sliding glass doors into my father’s study. Michael is beside me. His tail smacks the bricked ground with each wag. Together our breaths fog the window, creating our own distinctive, separate, murky pools.
My father doesn’t see our obscured reflections right away. He is preoccupied, staring straight ahead, leaning back in his office chair; his legs are propped up on his desk and crossed at the ankle. In his right hand he holds a microphone, and I can see his mouth moving but I cannot hear a single word.
I still have only a vague grasp of what he is doing in there even though I am now eight. I know that he has won awards for his writing. (I carefully take the Emmys down and play with them sometimes.) But any real, tangible comprehension of his work is still lost on me, and I have still not seen many more Twilight Zone episodes.
I am not supposed to be there, standing by his door when he is working. I know this. Is this rule spoken or presumed? I don’t remember. Nevertheless, I stare unabashedly through the glass waiting for him to notice us. Michael’s big red head is focused on him, too.
My yellow raincoat flaps conspicuously in the wind behind me. Perhaps it is this flash of color that catches my father’s eye. With his free hand he waves us in and pushes some buttons on the Dictaphone. I watch as the reel stops, as he sets the microphone down and turns toward us and smiles.
He seems unfazed by my interruption, perhaps finished with what he was doing and intrinsically aware of why I am there. “Grumple? How many more days until Christmas?” he asks, petting Michael who is pawing him in the air. My dad and I both know the answer. The Advent calendar my mother has hung in the kitchen, with its sparkling pictures of snow-filled, starlit skies, shows only fifteen more windows to open, fifteen more days.
Although my father is Jewish and fiercely proud of his heritage, we celebrate Christmas, not as an acknowledgment of any religious significance, but rather for the spirit of it or, as he said, “The wondrous magic.”
And that is why on that uncharacteristically cold, soggy LA day in December I am standing in his office, dripping rain on the slate floor. We are making plans for that evening when he will thread the sixteen-millimeter reel onto the projector, pull down the screen in front of the bookshelves, and together my family and our friends will watch “Night of the Meek”—one of the few Twilight Zones I am intimately familiar with. The lights will be shut off; my father will hit the switch on the machine and join us. The filmstrip, crackling in those first few moments in the darkness, will finally begin, and after the opening scenes, we will hear my father’s voice and then see him on the enlarged screen, “snow” falling on his winter coat, on his head, and circling all around him. With his arms crossed in front of him, he will continue:
This is Mr. Henry Corwin, normally unemployed, who once a year takes the lead role in the uniquely American Institution, that of department-store Santa Claus in a road-company version of “The Night Before Christmas.” But in just a moment Mr. Henry Corwin, ersatz Santa Claus, will enter a strange kind of North Pole which is one part the wondrous spirit of Christmas and one part the magic that can only be found in . . . The Twilight Zone.
Beyond being enormously proud that it’s my dad, my dad, up there, the relevance of this particular episode is not lost on me even then.
“Night of the Meek” is the story of a down-and-out department store Santa Claus, played by Art Carney, who, after arriving at work drunk, is fired by the manager, Mr. Dundee. In a wonderful scene, he tells the manager he would have reminded an irate customer: “Christmas is more than barging up and down department store aisles and pushing people out of the way! Someone has to tell her that Christmas is another thing finer than that. Richer, truer, and should come with patience and love, charity, compassion. That’s what I would have told her if you’d given me a chance. You know another reason why I drink, Mr. Dundee? So that when I walk down the tenements, I can really think it’s the North Pole and the children are elves and that I’m really Santa Claus bringing them a bag of wondrous gifts for all of them. I just wish, Mr. Dundee, on one Christmas, only one, that I could see some of the hopeless ones and the dreamless ones, just on one Christmas, I’d like to see the meek inherit the Earth.”
He then discovers a garbage bag that magically contains any gift wished for. He proceeds to give all the gifts away. At the end, despondent that he no longer has any gifts to give, he stumbles on the “real” Santa’s sleigh in a back alley. And an elf sitting in it urges him to join her and go back to the North Pole. My dad’s closing narration to this episode truly captures his feelings about Christmas:
A word to the wise, to all the children of the twentieth century, whether their concern be pediatrics or geriatrics, whether they crawl on hands and knees and wear diapers or walk with a cane and comb their beards. There’s a wondrous magic to Christmas, and there’s a special power reserved for little people. In short, there’s nothing mightier than the meek.
Both my parents love this season. My dad’s sentimental streak is almost as intense as his crusading moralistic streak. Undoubtedly the sounds, the smells, the decorations, and the music all evoke something deep within him of another time and another place.
He tells me how, when he was little, his parents once had to hide a small Christmas tree under a bed when some of the more religious relatives came to visit.
He also loves Christmas carols and says they “melt” him. “Oh Holy Night” is a favorite of his, but we never can remember any words except “Fall on your knees,” so together, we sing those and ad-lib the rest.
Every year he puts up the Christmas lights outside. One year he gets up on the ladder, tacks them all up, climbs back down, and moves the ladder to admire his work. He forgets the hammer he’s left on the top rung, which falls and hits him on the head. It is a wonder, and a miracle, that he is not badly hurt.
At night, after he reads to me, he always says, “Blow out the light,” and I blow while he turns the switch. He stays for a moment, and together we watch his multicolored Christmas lights blinking on and off, shadowing my bedroom wall.
The Super 8 camera, an enormous thing with a blinding bright light, is always brought out to document Christmas, other holidays, and family trips. Most of these home movies are “directed” and filmed by my mother, each beginning with a title sheet she tucks into fall leaves, or Christmas decorations, or Easter eggs, announcing the season or the occasion. On one Christmas morning the film begins with all of our feet getting out of bed.
Every year, when I am old enough to appreciate it, we watch Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, tears streaming down our faces at the end when George Bailey’s little girl, Zuzu, says, “Look, Daddy! Teacher says, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings!” and George says, “Attaboy, Clarence.”
My dad is nostalgic and childlike. This is never more apparent than at Christmastime. He never tires of tradition. He takes me to a place with shops and restaurants called the Brentwood Mart. When we get out of the car he holds my hand. “Holding paddles,” he calls it. We have a hot chocolate by the fire pit. Every year he tells me, “So, here’s what I got Mom, but first you have to promise not to tell, okay?” I always nod excitedly, feeling important that he is entrusting me with his secret. On Christmas Eve, my parents go to the home of Barbara and Dick Berg—friends from the days of live television, when the four of them lived in Westport. Dick was running an art supply store and gallery and writing in his spare time, before eventually moving to LA to become a film and television producer. He told me recently, “Your dad and I loved each other from the first night we met.”
Dick and my dad exchange gag gifts at Christmas. An ugly pair of cuff links becomes a favorite, passing back and forth between them for decades.
Every year for New Year’s Eve we fly to Columbus, Ohio, where my great-grandmother “Nana,” my mother’s grandmother, lives and where my mother grew up when she wasn’t away at various schools. My great-grandfather Frank Caldwell, who my mother adored, died before I was born. I have seen photographs of this handsome, white-haired man. He designed their house following a trip they took to Switzerland. They fell in love with the architecture and built their Ohio home to look like a Swiss chalet. It has three stories. The upper two have small porches. One is a small indoor porch. Frank and his father also designed and built the red summer cottage on Cayuga Lake.
When we arrive, Jodi and I run through the house, through all of the mahogany-paneled rooms with the heavy, dark, antique furniture, and then, two steps at a time, we zoom up three flights of stairs to the attic. There we roller-skate, attaching our skates to our shoes with skate keys. For hours we skate back and forth, back and forth, across the worn, wooden floor, calling each other by the nicknames we have given each other, which we hate, but occasionally use playfully. Jodi yells, “Go! Caldie!” after my middle name Caldwell, and I answer, “Go! Joyce!”—her real name, but I am the only one who uses it.
An enormous wardrobe sits in a far corner on this attic floor. It holds some of my great-grandmother’s coats and hats, and on the shelf, some of my great-grandfather’s papers. I do not pay much attention to the contents of this wardrobe beyond pretending I can enter it and disappear to Narnia. I am a huge fan of the C.S. Lewis books. Like my dad, I love fantasy.
Downstairs in the living room is a brick fireplace, and beside it, a glass vase filled with hundreds of colored marbles. My sister and I play with them by the hearth. We divvy up the marbles and give them names—Bev for the blue ones, Wendy for white, et cetera. Sometimes my dad lies on the floor with us and we shoot them back and forth.
Nana’s closet leads into the bathroom. This always feels magical to me, like a secret room.
Although she always seems very old to me, I adore my great-grandmother. Perhaps because I was named after her late daughter, my mother’s mother, I sense a closeness, an unspoken attachment.
During these early years, she and I sit at the piano, and she plays, her head with its clouds of blue gray hair bent over the keys. I know that she cannot carry a tune. This is evident even with my untrained child’s ear, and I know some of the chords she strikes cannot possibly be in the songbook, but that does not deter either one of us. We sing out our own version of “Silent Night,” her scratchy voice and my little one wafting through the house.
We all treasure these trips back east, the change of climate, our breath in the wintry air, and being tucked into this wonderful old house surrounded by snow. For my father, these vacations are a respite from work, although when I am older I recognize that distant look he has when I know he is writing in his head.
Even in Columbus he gets up early, earlier even than we do. After breakfast he takes us outside and we trudge through the snow-filled, silent sidewalk and into the backyard. Although I loathe having to wear a snowsuit, I love being in the snow with him. He tirelessly pulls my sister and me up the hill in our sleds, over and over, up and down. He takes his brown mittens off and blows on his hands.
I didn’t know it then, but my father had Raynaud’s disease, a circulatory problem that is an additional complication from years of heavy smoking. He only stops for a few moments, though, to warm up his fingers, and then slides down with us again and pulls our sleds back up. Years later, I remember his fingers turning absolutely white. I remember him warning us of the dangers of smoking. “See?” he’d say, in his serious voice, blowing smoke through a white paper towel. “See it turning yellow? That’s what nicotine does to your lungs.”
When I am eight, my great-grandmother has a series of strokes. My parents have an electric lift installed that attaches to the banister, so she is still able to go up and down stairs, but I think Jodi and I ride in it more than she ever does.
My great-grandmother’s nurse, Sylvia Dill—I always thought her name was Sylvia Miss Dill—and I play long games of checkers in the afternoon on the indoor porch while my grandmother rests. On sunny days, the light floods through the partially closed curtains and falls across the checkerboard, warming the pieces. She takes a long time planning her moves.
Gradually my great-grandmother grows more and more disabled until eventually she becomes bedridden. When we visit, I read to her from a chair pulled up close to the bed. She lies there, so still in her blue cotton nightgown, the sheets pulled up beneath her chin, her hair white against the pillow and her face expressionless.
In the end she is not always lucid and she becomes agitated. Her hands flap against the flowered bedspread and then in the air above her chest like trapped, colorless birds. She looks at me with unfamiliarity, telling me in a strange, whispery voice, “Don’t let the little girl jump out the window.”
I never know what to do in these moments. Afraid to leave her, I sit up straight in the chair beside her, my feet barely touching the floor, and watch as the person I know vanishes a little more each day, while I sit impotent, frozen, unable to summon the words to free her.
We are in California when the call comes that she has died. It is decided that I will go with my mother to Columbus.
It is late when we arrive. My mother carries the gray suitcase we share, and I follow her up the wooden stairs, watching as she sets it in a corner bedroom and then collapses, exhausted, on the covers.
I walk past her, straight ahead. The moon, huge, lights my great-grandmother’s room, illuminating everything in an unfamiliar light.
I stand in the doorway, afraid to go farther, afraid of this empty, cold room still full of her things. I battle this growing comprehension of her absence. I choke down tears and swipe at my eyes.
Finally, I force myself to walk to her desk and turn on the little Tiffany light. Her desk still holds her glass figurines, her stamps, cards from friends, poems she likes, letters from my parents, and her notes from my dad. She wrote him frequently about Twilight Zones she watched and he wrote her back. Toward the end, though, her writing became shaky, difficult to read, impaired by the strokes.
I pick up the small bottle of perfume on her dresser. I want to spray it in the air and close my eyes. I hold it up but then quickly set it back down, somehow knowing, even then, that the familiar scent of her in this vacant, still room will be devastating.
In the corner, her bed is made, the bedspread neatly tucked in, perfectly smooth, as if no one has lain there, ever.
I consider curling up there. Just for a while, a moment. But I am afraid. Afraid of the enormity of this loss pushing through me.
The next morning my mother and I go to her service. The church is full, mostly of older people with sad smiles and heavy coats. I notice a few who still have snow on their boots.
My mother sits beside me, and I stare at the white-haired heads in the pews beyond us. I remember how the sun from the tiny windows, way above, spills down as if through prisms, illuminating the minister as he talks far away in a quiet voice, saying my great-grandmother’s name, “Louise,” over and over.
I bite my lip and I try not to cry.
We leave for the airport later that day. My mother has called a cab. The driver helps us with our suitcase, and my mother locks the empty house behind us. We crawl into the backseat, and the cabbie starts the meter. My mother tells me, “Turn around and take one last look. You will probably never be back.” We both turn in unison, and I see that my mother is crying. One day I will wonder what other memories she may have been doing battle with that day. Was she thinking about more than my great-grandmother as the house grew smaller in the distance? Who did she imagine at the door? Was she thinking about all the years, in all those Februarys she waited as a child on that cold top step for a birthday card from her father? Or was she thinking about her grandfather standing in the garden waving up at her?
It begins to snow and we lose the house sooner than we might have, but, for a moment, just before it disappears through the heavy falling flakes, it looks like a perfect Christmas card, and I remember Nana, pressed at the glass, as she had all those winter mornings at the end of our trips, slowly waving good-bye as our yellow cab pulled away.
My parents establish scholarships at Ohio State in the names of my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather, Frank Caldwell, who had been the first professor of electrical engineering at Ohio State and chair of that department following graduation from Cornell University in Ithaca.
Some of my great-grandmother’s belongings are eventually shipped to our house in California, and a few to the cottage: the desk from her room, the green Tiffany lamp that hung over her dining room table, a clock that chimed in the hall, a few trunks, some tables and chairs, and many miscellaneous items that throughout the years will evoke some memory of her.
Among these things, carefully wrapped in layers of newspaper deep in a box, are the photographs that hung on the wall by her bed. By the time she had her final stroke, her movement and mind were greatly impaired. I like to think, though, that alone there, when the afternoon sun illuminated the wall by her bed and passed over the faces of these people she loved and who loved her, she was still able to turn and know them.
Most are black-and-white, placed in the box in sequential order: her parents, both of her children, and her husband, all of whom she lost long before she died. Besides these are photos of my mother as a child, a picture of my mother and father on their wedding day, and a picture of her great-grandchildren—Jodi and me.
And there, too, a photograph of my father at a typewriter, on which he wrote:
“To my amazing and remarkable Grandmother.
With Love, Rod.”
Years later, the house will be given to the Ohio State University and sadly, eventually, torn down.
I will think of that a decade later when my mother sells our house in California and the new owners invite us back to show us how they will change it. But I have not been warned that construction has begun, and when the woman opens the front door, I realize the exterior is simply a façade and I freeze. I can go no farther. There are no interior walls, just blown-out space, and behind this stranger’s smiling face, it is as if a bomb has gone off. The inside so shattered that even memory will struggle to restore what was.