At Christmas the presidential family traditionally held a large gathering for the politicians, White House staff, and the Press. One of those invited was Scotty, who brought his little daughter, Lily, to view the Christmas tree.
Scotty was divorced and saw Lily only on weekends, and sometimes not even then if he had work to do. Since he loved her more than anyone on earth, he was pleased to show off to her at Christmas the Palace where he worked.
Fifty other children were there too, dressed in party clothes and eyeing on tiptoe the platters of sweets and cakes and candied orange peel as the grown-ups bellowed at each other from three feet above. In one corner stood a group of carolers dressed in red velvet, and in another stood the tree with false packages all gaily wrapped and heaped around its foot. The smells of ginger and nutmeg hung in the air; the crowd was thick enough to make it hard for the waiters to push through with their trays of hot wine or platters of oysters and cheese canapés; and when the double doors opened to show the banquet table laden with hams and turkeys and nuts and cheeses and fish and fruits and cakes and chocolates, you could hear the sigh of pleasure; and then the moving feet, the crush, as the assembled guests shouldered through the doorway to descend on the table like the locusts on Egypt and clean off every tray. In no time the platters were reduced to ragged tails and scraps, limp parsley and sagging sculptured Santas of vegetables and candied fruit, as if the crowd had never eaten before. Waiters replenished the platters, running in and out with trays.
In the midst of this happy throng, several hundred strong, the President, quite his old self now—recovered from his madness, it seemed, or stroke or hallucinations—mingled, first with his wife on his arm doing her duty as First Lady, then separately, each working the crowd like well-trained bird dogs, and whenever possible dropping first-name benisons on their friends.
The President shook hands with the Episcopal bishop and made a point of greeting the tall, bald, Fundamentalist minister who had been invited to counterbalance the bishop, and of course in honor of the season; and he spoke to a black Baptist minister and a white rightist, and a Supreme Court justice, and many other important personages who were celebrating the idea of tolerance and mercy on that holiday.
Matt was also pleased to see that Jim Sierra had brought his wife Susan and their two girls. Christmas—Hanukkah—this darkest period of the northern year—is a time of reconciliation, when fighting couples vow once more to make their marriages work. The President greeted Susan warmly, strangely grateful that she had taken her husband back, even if it was for the children’s sake; and he laughed with her about the phone call he had made, and listened to her awkward stuttered apologies with a certain prideful satisfaction. Around him the voices rose in a deafening din, and the musicians played, and the carolers sang, and the Christmas tree lights winked among gaudy velvet-ribboned balls.
The President could not possibly have noticed Lily, elbow-high to the guests and twisting past their hips, drawn for reasons she could not ascertain to the edge of the room, where she stopped short; for there stood an angel, and in all that crowd no one brushed against its radiance.
She stood, rapt, watching it shimmer and glow. It was formed of a wonderful whiteness, more brilliant than any whiteness of this earth, and yet it flared with colors too; it had no wings, and yet it gave an impression of pinions, for the light of which it was composed flowed up and down, in and out, like breathing, leaving an impression like the waving of wings.
The angel stood alone, smiling at the crowd, and Lily held her breath. Then it turned and smiled at her. She waved one tentative hand. “Hello,” she whispered. But her voice was lost in the singing, which flooded everything. It was like nothing she had ever heard before (though later Scotty disputed this: The noise was only the musicians playing on the far side of the room). So they stood a moment, the angel and the little child of wondrous innocence, and then Lily moved closer to the figure, which bent toward her, responding to her silent question. At which she threw herself at its feet.
Matt saw a surging of the guests, a shifting like sand toward one corner of the room. A child had fainted.
“What’s happened?”
The child had dropped to the floor, feet under her, and was staring idiotically at the wall, crying uncontrollably. Scotty, frightened, embarrassed, pushed through to her side.
“Get up, Lily. Don’t crumple on the floor.” He pulled her arm.
“Yes,” she murmured.
“Well, do it! What’s wrong?” Her legs were noodles.
“Do you see it, Daddy?” she said, making no effort to stand. “Look.”
“Lily, get up.” The angel faded at this moment and a wail rose from Lily’s throat.
“Lily! Stop it.”
“It’s gone. Did you see it? Daddy, did you look?”
“See what?”
“It was an angel.”
The Fundamentalist minister stopped to overhear. He was a tall thin man, an Ichabod Crane, the President thought, a Giacometti, a setter dog on point. Then everything happened at once, a flurry of activity. Matt, approaching, thought the child was sick. He saw Scott standing over her, as well as the tall, lean, balding and black-coated minister, and each was tugging on one arm. Scotty was ordering his daughter to stand up, and the minister to describe what she had seen.
“Let go,” she cried to both.
“What is it?” said the guests, and, “What’s happening?”
“A miracle!” cried the minister. His voice could fill a cathedral without a microphone, and he liked to try. “It’s an angel! This innocent child has seen an angel! There’s an angel here.”
The President felt sick. He put one hand against the wall, while the room revolved.
“Take your hands off her,” said Scotty, pushing at the strange minister in black, who fought back angrily. It was the preacher’s territory, after all, and Scotty, though father to the child, was trespassing.
“‘And a little child shall lead them,’” he boomed in his carrying voice. “Tell us what you see, girl.”
Lily’s voice wailed above them all, a treble siren.
“Great balls of fire!” said the Episcopal bishop at the President’s elbow. His mouth curled with contempt.
“Out of the mouths of babes!” cried the Fundamentalist. “On your knees, O ye faithless,” he continued, following his own direction in his enthusiasm. “There’s an angel in our midst!”
“Stop that maniac,” ordered the President through gritted teeth to no one in particular.
“Jesus said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto—’” But the rest of his words were lost in the babble of the crowd. Such is the fate of a prophet in his own land.
Scotty was pulling on his daughter, folding his child into his protective embrace. “Let go!” he snarled at the minister, who, still kneeling, folded his long body, legs of a heron, down toward Lily; and she lay curled in a ball on the floor—an armadillo, a hedgehog—covering her head with the fluttering hands and arms that the two men tried to pry apart.
The President pushed forward. “Let me through,” he ordered, and the people fell back respectfully, so that he managed to put one hand on Scotty’s arm just as he was drawing back to slug the minister.
“Hey, Scott.” As if addressing a horse, calmingly, soothingly. He held the father’s shoulder momentarily, then leaned down to pick up Lily, and, because he was President, the other two relinquished their ambitious holds.
“You get this bastard away from my daughter.” Scotty’s eyes burned with rage.
“It’s a miracle!” cried the minister again, still carried away by the event, though dampened by uneasiness, for perhaps she had seen nothing and was fooling everyone. If so, it was too late: He had placed his bets when he first opened his mouth; he could not renege. “She saw an angel, Mr. President. An angel in this very room, right at Christmastime.”
“Shut up,” said the President in annoyance. Then, “Did you?” he asked softly, lifting the child in his arms.
I wish I could say that for one moment he was face-to-face with this enchanting child. She was five, almost six, with an air of such innocent, clear wonder, lips parted, that he could not prevent a smile. But that’s not what happened. It was awful. He took her in his arms—all elbows, knees, and joints. A President, an Oriental satrap, is accustomed to respect, not a squirming, slippery, twisting five-year-old slithering out of his arms! He grinned valiantly at the surrounding guests, and almost slung her into her father’s grip, where she buried her face in his rough woolen jacket and wept.
Humiliated, Matt patted her gently on the back and turned to laugh at the assembled guests, and was now struck by the silence in the place, for the musicians had stopped playing too, and the crowd had hushed.
“Well, it’s good news.” He laughed lightly, including the Fundamentalist in his banter. “Any angel’s welcome. We could use a host of angels here, protecting us in these times. I‘ve seen lots of angels myself,” he said with a mad, deceitful grin that devastated his admirers and broke them into little puffs of laughter. “That’s what Christmas is about—Good Tidings, Peace among us all. So lift your glasses and join me in a toast.” He paused to look around and ascertain the mood had broken. “To Peace,” he said, with his drink lifted toward the ceiling so all could see. “To the end of the wars. To our collected friends, to Christmas, and to winning the next election.”
It was the last phrase that caused the outburst of applause. A shout of approval filled the room and fists were raised high and closed palms with the two-finger V, and voices too, as the musicians struck up the election song.
The President leaned over to Scotty. “Take her to my office,” he said, “I’ll meet you there. I‘ll get Jim Sierra to show you.”
“I’m taking her home, Mr. President,” said the reporter. “Come on, honey. We’re going home.”
“Don’t leave, don’t leave,” cried the Fundamentalist preacher, rising on tiptoe, a flamingo now as his face flushed red with emotion. “Who are you? What’s your name?” he asked the child, who turned her face again, sheltering in her father’s lapels.
“Take her to my office,” the President ordered, waving Jim up to his side. He didn’t want to let her out of his sight any more than the minister did. And now a curious thing occurred. Scotty, who would have cut off his fingertip for five minutes alone in the President’s office, entirely forgot his work.
“No. We’re going home.” Brusquely, angrily, he picked her up and pushed through to the hallway, where he snatched their coats from the checkroom and, holding coats as well as Lily in his arms, strode off.
There was nothing the President could do.
Outside the snow fell on an empty Ellipse. Inside, the First Lady smiled at constituents and wished her headache would go away, or that she had time to dream of her lover in California. She had not been in the room when the little girl had fainted, had not understood what the ruckus was about. The Fundamentalist minister attached himself to Jim Sierra, demanding to know the name of the father and child, and then, distracted by reporters, repeated and elaborated on the vision he envisioned she had seen. His deep voice resonated with the words of God. Jim went to the bar to down another drink, and wondered if his wife was sleeping with Scotty Bauer, whom he’d seen talking with her, the bitch, in easy intimacy, or if, as she pretended, they’d never met before that night.
And the musicians played and people milled and waiters passed more bottled cheer, which vanished down the open throats.
But Matt Adams, the President, went to his office and sat at his desk, staring out at the dark and empty lawns.
Meanwhile, the world was burning up. The predominant emotion swinging like a comet round the world was … fear.
For some people it came as fear of disease or death, but for many others it was free-floating, like fear of failure or success. There was fear of not being good enough (whatever that meant) to make it (whatever that meant), fear of being found out, or of ridicule or making a mistake, any one of which would lead to rejection, isolation, loneliness. So each fear led to another, but at the root was the fear of separateness, the terrible isolation of being alone, cast out from human company. It was a kind of fear of death. There was fear of economic insecurity, and longing for a sense of safety, as if money could fill the hollow of the heart. Some people were afraid of a punitive, jealous Deity, but few were afraid of losing, or never finding, grace, though that would constitute the ultimate belonging—oneness, Home!
Almost anything was justified because of fear, but the world was also burning up with desire; and what was curious, the most egregious behavior could be excused, forgiven, if it was caused by fear (“I was so scared!”), but hardly any act on the grounds of mere desire (“I wanted it”).
Matt wondered, was there any difference between fear and desire? How do we know when our motives are pure?
In those days terrible acts were committed, atrocities, human against human, for everyone was afraid of pain, and in anxiety created it.
It could be said that the world was burning up with fear. But hardly anyone noticed that it was also burning up with joy.
Hardly anyone ran outside in the morning to cry in wonder at the glorious red dawn; or stopped to hail the pale moon scudding through its clouds on coon-hunting night. Hardly anyone gave in to an appropriate, rapt sense of gratitude for the marvel of a cockroach in the kitchen cabinet (product of millennia of breeding true), or the snails under their little shells eating at the garden lettuce in the spring, or the black-and-brown striped woolly bears crossing the highways on a crisp fall day, while the geologic plates groaned beneath their tiny, hairy feet and the earth shifted and continents moved and ice caps melted and volcanoes tore through the crust of the earth, erupting in ferocious joy.
There was joy and pleasure even in the suffering, depending on how you decided to view the matter. Even pain and illness comes as a blessing when you consider that its purpose is to warn, to give us a chance to set the matter right. So the world was burning up with joy as well as grief! And babies were being born each hour who were more beautiful than any child before (each mother knew it in her heart). You had only to look at skin like silk and the tiniest of fingernails glued to the ends of dainty fingers, eyes that opened and shut and could focus and discern, and growing limbs, and laughter bubbling from unpretentious throats like pear blossoms in May: Oh! It was a fine, good world in those days, a grand, brave, hearty place to be.
And so were the people who lived in it: children crying to their mothers on a summer’s afternoon to Look! Look at ME! Mom, look! Or the teenagers, struggling with their own brooding, restless, anguished hearts, the growing up and separating from their parents being as painful as for limpets pulled from a seacoast rock. And then the adults, people so old that you’d think nothing further would ever happen in their lives except the toiling, nine to five, and there they were, falling in love, again and again, and making promises they could not keep to love one another for eternity, not remembering that all things change—all hearts, all eyes—and that the only constancy lies in the love of God, which springs up bountifully in our own hearts over and over again, as evidenced by our falling in love like teenagers with lots of different people even up to the age of ninety-two. A fine, good world it was, full of pleasure, if you knew how to look for it in the struggle for shelter and food; full of riches showered on us all. Or full of suffering, if that’s what you were happy dwelling on.
The President, lying in bed that night, was struck by the insight. A prayer, he thought, is nothing but a concentrated thought, and if all prayers are answered (as various religions claim) then we constantly create our fate by our own thoughts.
And if we get what we want, he thought, too wide-awake to drop off into sleep, then how can we ever achieve world peace? Humans want thrills, excitement, not serenity; and these are only found in fear.