BRENDAN GILL
Father Hagerty sat at his desk in the bay window of the rectory parlor stacking, in precarious piles, the nickels and dimes of the annual Christmas collection. This little hoard had been gathered at Mass the previous Sunday in order to buy, according to parish custom, a fine turkey dinner for the rectory household—Father Hagerty; his curate, Father Cain; and his housekeeper, Mrs. Katharine O’Degnan Malone. Father Hagerty added coin to coin in mixed discouragement and hope. After setting aside four dollars for the dinner, he planned to turn over the rest of the collection to a fund he had fostered in secret for several years. Sooner or later he would have the means to buy a new Saint Anthony to stand by the sacristy door. The plaster fingers of the present Saint Anthony, who was twelve years old, were beginning to chip.
Father Hagerty had placed his desk in the bay window twenty years before. He called it his lighthouse, since from it, as he worked on parish records and reports—he had long ago given up preparing sermons—he could keep an eye on the doings of the town. Barnardsville’s Main Street ran directly in front of the rectory. Across the street stood Dodd’s garage, where everyone gathered in the early morning to discuss the temperature, a various topic in a town built among the hills; and just beyond the church stood O’Connor’s general store, where everyone gathered in the early evening to discuss the temperature again and to make a pattern of the long, lazy day. Now, as he totted up his sums, Father Hagerty watched his parishioners walking home from work. It was impossible, with the dusk falling, to make out faces, but he nodded to everyone and everyone nodded in return. Father Hagerty supposed that a few of those to whom he nodded were Protestants, but even they, in this town, made good friends.
From the racket of pots and dishes in the kitchen, Father Hagerty guessed it was time he washed his hands. He had, after all these years, given up telling time by the clock. Mrs. Malone woke him as she entered the house at seven every morning. He got up to the sound of the kettle’s being set on the stove to boil. He shaved to the sound of places being laid for Father Cain and him on the naked dining-room table. It was like that all day. Now it could hardly be earlier than six, for at that hour Mrs. Malone reached the noisy climax of her preparations for supper. Father Hagerty swept the neat piles of coins into a heap in the middle of the desk.
The collection totalled twelve dollars and twenty-five cents. Eight dollars and twenty-five cents of that amount could be hidden in Father Hagerty’s fund. The Saint Anthony on whom he had his eye, pictured in color in a catalogue in the bottom drawer of the desk, was priced at one hundred and ten dollars, plus the cost of shipping. Five more years, Father Hagerty figured, should find him at his goal. He nodded with satisfaction. As he got up from the desk, he caught sight of young Father Cain on the path outside. Father Hagerty shook his head. His new curate worried him; the boy was too thin. He stepped into the hall to meet him as he opened the front door. Father Cain’s lips were blue with cold.
“No muffler?” Father Hagerty asked severely.
“I didn’t know how cold it was, Father.”
“Coldest town in Connecticut. I told you that when the Bishop sent you up here this fall.”
“I’m sorry, Father.” Father Cain had been ordained in June. He still felt humble in front of other priests and stared at them in wonder when they bowed to him and called him Father.
“How’s Mrs. O’Donaghue?”
Father Cain tried to smile. “She’s like all the rest. She wants you, of course. She knows you don’t think she’s very sick if you only send me.”
“Don’t let that worry you. She’ll be up and in the thick of it Christmas morning, now she’s had a priest to talk to.”
Father Cain said, “You can feel Christmas! The whole town’s excited about it. Everybody’s got a tree and lights on it and the kids all say ‘Hello, Father’ to me very carefully and you can see the cars coming back from Hartford and Waterbury full of packages.” His eyes widened. “It’s really here.”
Father Hagerty studied the banister of the stairs. “This is your first Christmas away from home, isn’t it? There’s always a first one, you know.”
Father Cain kept smiling. “Yes, Father.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Father Hagerty said. “Why shouldn’t you go home? It’s only forty miles. You can take my Ford. No reason for staying here. I won’t hear of anything else.”
The boy shook his head. His lips were still a little blue. “I want to stay. I want to say my first Christmas Mass here.”
Father Hagerty climbed the stairs, resting his weight heavily on each step. “We’re having a fine turkey dinner. Mrs. Malone always gives us a real old-fashioned Christmas, with all the trimmings.” He looked down on Father Cain from the second floor. “I hope we have snow, too. It always makes it seem more like Christmas to me. Do you think we will?”
“Feels like it, Father,” the boy said.
Father Cain offered Mass at nine o’clock on Christmas morning, Father Hagerty at eleven. Everyone said “Merry Christmas, Father” to Father Cain as he stood in the back of the church after each Mass. From twelve until one, Father Hagerty and he sat in the parlor and waited for Mrs. Malone to call them into the dining room. There was hardly anything to talk about. Father Cain’s family had sent him, by mail, a sweater, some books, and a pair of skis, of which he felt ashamed. Father Hagerty’s sister had knitted him woollen socks. “She always makes them too big in the heel,” Father Hagerty had said. “I’ve got twenty pairs of them up in the drawer. She’s a good girl.” Father Hagerty had given Father Cain a pipe and Father Cain had given Father Hagerty a box of cigars. They were embarrassed by the similarity of their gifts. It seemed easier to say nothing about them.
“All right, Father,” Mrs. Malone said finally. She stood in the doorway in a clean apron, wiping her clean hands. “The bird looks like leather. You ought to give Tim Bowen a piece of your mind.”
“You always say that, Mrs. Malone. It wouldn’t seem natural to sit down at the table if you didn’t.”
The dining room faced north, toward the green spruce woods that bordered the town. In spite of the four candles making a square of light on the table, the room was dark. Father Hagerty sat down, folded his hands, and recited, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which of Thy bounty we are about to receive. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.” Then he sipped his tomato juice. “It didn’t snow,” he said.
Father Cain shook his head. “No. Most Christmases, I guess, it doesn’t.” He spoke hurriedly, ignoring his tomato juice. “I remember I got a Flexible Flyer for Christmas once and there wasn’t any snow. I wanted to take it out and try it on the bare ground. I couldn’t wait.”
Father Hagerty looked at the boy. “You can’t, when you’re a kid.”
“We always buy a tree the first day they come in. Mom and Dad and all of us go down and pick out the biggest one we can find. Then, on Christmas Eve, we set it up in the hall by the stairs, where there’s room for it, no matter how high it is. Sometimes we get one so high we have to go up on the second floor to put the star on its top.”
“That’s a real tree.”
“You should see it. Then, about midnight, everybody goes up to his room and gets the presents he’s bought, all wrapped up in green and red paper, and brings them down and puts them under the tree. Everyone has a special pile. We always try to see who has the biggest pile, but they’re usually just about the same. We’ve caught Mom sneaking extra presents into any pile that looks a little smaller than the rest.”
Mrs. Malone entered and removed the tomato-juice glasses. She frowned at the talkative Father Cain but said nothing. Then she carried the turkey to the table, a thin brown turkey on a mended porcelain platter.
Father Hagerty rubbed his chin. “It does look a little small,” he said.
“What did I tell you?” Mrs. Malone demanded. “That Tim Bowen!”
“And the next morning,” Father Cain said, “Christmas morning, we all get up in the dark and go down and open our presents.”
“Thirty-eight cents a pound for meat like that,” said Mrs. Malone.
“Which do you prefer, dark meat or light?” asked Father Hagerty.
Father Cain swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. He got up and walked carefully from the room. Father Hagerty and Mrs. Malone turned to follow the sound of his feet on the stairs. As the door of his bedroom closed behind him, Mrs. Malone sucked in her breath. “They’re all the same. Next year he’ll tuck it in fast enough.”
Father Hagerty cut off a leg of the turkey with some difficulty and put it on his plate. “He doesn’t know that now,” he said. He was thinking he might just as well have added the cost of the turkey to his secret fund. He might have brought Saint Anthony a half year nearer the faded pedestal in the church. The meat was tough, all right.
1939