Christmas Eve 1933
Around ten in the morning, I called John’s desk at the AP from my room at the Sutton Hotel.
“Bosco,” he said.
“Yes, hello. I am calling to let you know that you have been enrolled in the Fish of the Month Club.”
I heard the crackle of John’s lips pulling back from his teeth into a broad smile. “Is that right?”
“Yes indeed, sir. For the next year, on the first of each month, a freshly caught whole fish will appear on your doorstep in a brown paper bag. January is catfish month.”
He snickered. “Is that right?”
I nodded. “Mm-hmm, yes, sir. Now with catfish, that comes from New Orleans. So we do tell folks north of Virginia to expect a slight odor. There is a man who brings them up from Louisiana on a bus, and it does take a little time …”
“Where are you calling from, Hick?”
“Fifty-Sixth and Second.”
John’s chair creaked and I pictured him sitting up. “No kidding?”
“Nope. I think I’ll be in the city for a little while at least.”
“You haven’t gone and quit your job, have you?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. Just … taking a little holiday. There’s nothing like the Big Apple at Christmas.”
John hesitated for a moment and I could tell that he knew I’d had my heart broken, that this was no victory lap.
“What are you working on?” I asked him, eager to steer him from pity.
“Bullitt’s trip to Moscow. He’s wrapping up there. And once I file that, a piece about a truck full of presents someone delivered to the children’s ward at New York Prez. Bill gave me tomorrow off for good behavior. So if you think you might be thirsty later …”
“Let me check my schedule.” I pretended to be flipping through the pages of my calendar. My mouth was sore and I wanted nothing more than a drink, but I had vowed to stick to the dentist’s orders not to mix the pain medicine with booze. I’d have to choke down plain seltzer. Today was my new leaf. I was determined.
“I think I can move some things around,” I said.
“Great. I’ll see you and my catfish at five.”
I hung up and lay back to rest my eyes for a moment. Hours later, I woke to a soft knock on the door of my room. A bellman handed me a telegram. I thanked him, closed the door, and braced myself, knowing good news hardly ever came this way.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the message in my lap. Nora and John were the only people who knew where I was. It could be an emergency at the AP, at the White House. Something could be wrong at Arthurdale. Ruth.
I tore off the envelope.
RUTH JOHNSON SAFELY DELIVERED HEALTHY BABY GIRL, GLORY JUNE, THIS A.M. FIRST THING SHE SAID WHEN BABE WAS IN ARMS WAS “PLEASE TELL MISS HICKOK SHE’S ALL RIGHT.”
MERRY CHRISTMAS,
CLARENCE
I stared at the words in wonder.
How marvelous it felt to be wrong about bad news! How marvelous to be wrong about the fate of the baby! I felt like my heart might stampede right out of my chest with joy. In my mind, I could see Ruth in her bed in the Arthur mansion, surrounded by her children and the other families, all of them smiling down at the baby. I wished I could be among them. Welcome to this big old hopeless case of a world, Glory June. We’ve done a shit job taking care of it so far. Maybe you will come up with some better answers.
For a minute I considered picking up the phone to call Nora; she must have been the one to tell Clarence where to send the message, and it would have been nice to share my joy with someone who understood what it meant to me that Ruth was all right. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And, plus, I had plans.
When I yanked open the heavy door and walked into the dim light of Dom’s, the smell of cigar smoke made me grin.
“Hiya, Hick,” John called. When I turned toward his voice, I glimpsed tawny fur and a slobbering snout.
“Prinz!”
I knelt down on the sticky floor and he nearly knocked me over with joy. First he brought his paws up to my shoulders and licked my nose. Then he leaped back down and galloped in a circle around me, howling.
I rubbed my fingers in the thick collar of fur around his neck, felt tears running down my nose as I patted his white belly. He flipped over and kicked his back legs in the air. “Hi, pal. Hi, hi, hi. Boy, is it good to see you.”
I wiped my nose on my sleeve and looked up at John. “How did you … ?”
He shrugged. “I thought you might like the chance to see him while you’re in town. I borrowed a buddy’s truck to go get him.”
I pressed my face into Prinz’s fur. “Well, goddamnit, John. That was a pretty swell thing to do. I’ll be goddamned.”
“One more goddamn and you get a free drink!” Dom called from where he stood behind the bar that was draped with cheap gold tinsel.
Prinz, back to leaping around in a circle, tipped his head back and bayed what, I swear on my life, sounded exactly like German shepherd for goddamn.
“Good old Prinz,” I said as we all laughed.
I paused to give John a once-over. He hadn’t taken his coat off yet and I noticed that it was new, a fine gray-and-burgundy herringbone tweed. It sure beat the frayed number he had worn last year. Maybe he’d gotten a raise. Or maybe he was on a winning streak. I hoped not.
I hated to think about his age because it made me feel old, but the truth was that John Bosco was a young man in his prime, in the greatest city in the world, engaged in what I thought was the noblest vocation a person could embrace: telling the truths of people’s lives in the newspaper. I was a little jealous, but mostly just proud. And glad to know him.
“Merry Christmas,” Dom said as we bellied up.
“Santa Claus brought you repeal,” I said. “Are you going to fix up this dump now that you can come out of the shadows?”
“Hell no,” Dom said. “What’ll you have?” He already had the stopper out of the bottle of bourbon and was ready to pour.
“Actually,” I said, bracing myself for their guffaws, “nothing for me tonight. Just a glass of seltzer if you have any around.”
Dom set the bottle back on the bar and smiled at me, waiting for the punchline. When none came, he nodded slowly and filled a glass with fizzing water. “Sure thing, Hick.”
John gave me a sidelong glance but he knew better than to ask, and we ferried our glasses to our table and sat down. Prinz was still snorting for joy as he settled on the floor near my chair. It was too cold in the room to take our coats off, but the growing crowd would soon fix that.
“The newsroom isn’t the same without you, Hick,” John said. He leaned back in his chair. “Everybody misses you.”
I smirked. “Save your flattery, rookie.” The pang I felt when I thought about the AP wasn’t quite as sharp as it had been even a month earlier. Maybe it was because I’d gone out to Arthurdale and seen those houses going up. Maybe it was knowing that Ruth had a roof over her head now, and a healthy baby. I would always be a reporter down in my bones, but my new gig wasn’t so bad.
“How’s Marina?”
He sat up and pinched the air with his fingers. “I am this close to convincing her to take me back.”
I groaned. “I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve had this conversation. Don’t you know when to give up, man?”
He shook his head. “There’s no escape from this infernal thing.”
I laughed. “From love, you mean?”
He raised his eyebrows in the affirmative and took a gulp of his drink. “You have to keep throwing your hat in the ring, over and over, until you croak. But this time it’s going to be different.”
“How?” I asked, with my lips twisted to the side.
“I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
My mouth dropped open like a January catfish’s. “Now why in the hell would she do that?”
“I’m serious, Hick. I’ve given up gambling.”
“Again?”
“No, I mean it. I haven’t placed a bet in three months. I really think I’ve licked it.”
I gave him a weak smile, hoping he was right.
“Look at you—you quit drinking!”
“I had a root canal! I’m thirty-six hours sober and I’m ready to drink a bottle of mouthwash.”
He sighed with a kind of sympathy only another failed quitter could offer. “Well, this is it for me—really—and now I just have to prove to her that she can trust me. And what better way to do that than to make it official, in front of God and everybody?”
“I don’t know, John. Maybe you should take it slow. Prove it to her over time …”
He shook his head. “It’s got to be tonight. And I need your help.”
That is how, an hour later, I found myself standing on the stoop of a row house on the corner of Mulberry and Broome, ringing the bell marked BERELLI. John was hiding just out of sight, holding Prinz’s leash, and he needed me to ring the bell, he said, because so far every time Marina had seen him, she’d slammed the door in his face.
“I thought you said you were ‘this close’?” I’d shouted when he explained his plan.
“I am, Hick—I swear I am.”
I’d only been able to roll my eyes.
The curtain whisked to the side and Marina looked relieved, and then confused, when she saw me. She opened the door, her dark hair loose on her shoulders.
“Hi, Marina,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Miss Hickok. What a nice surprise.” Her smile was interrupted by a sudden spreading panic. “Is … is everything all right? Is John all right?”
“Oh, yes, he is. It’s nothing like that. Actually …” I glanced over my shoulder, “John is here.” John stepped out from behind the car where he’d been hiding, and Marina’s expression hardened with exasperation. “Honestly, he is dying to talk to you, if you would just give him the chance.”
“Please leave. Both of you. You’re lucky my father didn’t answer the door.”
I could tell that she had promised herself she would say this the next time John came around, no matter what. She had promised herself she wouldn’t let him wear her down. But her mouth, striped bright red with lipstick, twitched a little in its frown. Now that she had seen his hangdog face, those pitiful ears of his, big as saucers, she was wavering.
“Marina, I don’t like him much more than you do—believe me. In fact, you would be doing me an enormous favor by letting him get what he has to say off his chest. If I have to hear one more time about how his heart is breaking, how he is going to die without you, blah, blah, blah, I might have to kill him.”
Her eyes flicked to mine and a tiny smile was forming. She crossed her arms and sighed. She wore only a pale pink dress, with tiny buttons like small shells at the cuffs, and I shivered looking at her.
“All right, John,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”
He stepped to the bottom of the stoop and after he handed off Prinz’s leash he shook my hand. “Thanks, Hick. You’re true-blue.”
“Good luck. You’re going to need it.” That was my cue to leave, but when I heard John begin talking as I started up the sidewalk, I couldn’t resist turning around to listen. The stoop on the building next door was mostly hidden by a low brick wall and I slipped over to it and got Prinz to sit quietly by rubbing the ridge of bone between his ears. Anyway, those two fools were so focused on each other, they didn’t even notice me.
“Hurry up, John,” she said. “I’m freezing and we’ve got to finish supper before mass.”
He took off his coat and held it up to her, and Marina shrugged. John took a few steps up to hand it to her, and though she draped it over her shoulders, she pointed to the sidewalk. “Go back down,” she said.
He held up his palm to show he wouldn’t argue. From the bottom step he said, “I’m done with gambling. Done.”
“Hm. Where have I heard that before?”
“I know. You have no reason to believe me, but I’m going to prove it to you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small book.
“What’s that?”
“Look at it.”
She took a few steps down, took the book and flipped through its pages.
“It’s my bank register,” John said. “All my account information’s in there, all my deposits and withdrawals.”
“So?”
“So, I’m giving it to you. You’re in charge of it all.”
I was suddenly aware that I had no business listening in on a conversation so intimate, but when I got up to leave I saw that the iron gate around the row house had swung closed behind me and I didn’t want to risk making noise opening it. I sat back down.
“I don’t want your money,” Marina said.
“It’s our money. For our apartment.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a key.
Peeking over the brick, I saw Marina’s eyebrows jump just a hair. She glanced over her shoulder at the front window of her parents’ house, worried that they might be standing there watching but intrigued too, I could see, by the idea of living somewhere else. Anywhere else. She surveyed the building, from the iron rail to the broken terra-cotta roof line, and then looked back at John with her hand on her hip.
“So what—first you want me to be your accountant and now you want me to keep house? No, thanks.” She pursed her lips to keep from smiling. She knew what he was getting at now, but she wasn’t going to make it easy for him, not by a long shot.
John got down on his knees. Not on one knee as protocol demanded, but on both, and he lowered his forehead down onto the black bows on the tops of Marina’s shoes. Oh boy, I thought. I winced with embarrassment. But still I couldn’t look away. The man was prostrated by love, praying to it.
“What the hell are you doing?” Marina cried.
“Marina,” John said, and reached for her hands. When she let him take them, I heard myself exhale; I knew it was going to be all right. “If you will be my wife, I promise you that I will spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of you. Every single day.”
“God, you are an idiot,” she said.
He laughed and rocked forward so that his face pressed against her torso. She slipped her fingers into his hair and tipped his face up to look at him. I was over the moon for my friend, though not convinced he wasn’t going to bungle it all again. But it hurt to watch the way they touched each other now—John’s fingers curled into the backs of her knees and Marina running her hand down his hair and into his collar— right out in the open on the stoop where anyone might pass by. They didn’t have a clue how lucky they were. They would never have to hide.
“You got a ring or something?” Marina said.
“Oh, Christ, I forgot.” John stood up and pulled one more thing out of his pocket, slipped it on her finger. “I hope it’s all right. I knew if it was too nice, you’d wonder where the money came from.”
Her full-throated laugh rang out through the street. “You’re not out of the woods yet, tesoro. Now we have to go inside and tell my father.”
She took his hand and they walked up the stairs, Marina leading the way. When they reached the door, she turned the knob and John extended his long arm, palm turned flat, to push the door open and hold it wide so that she could walk through first, so that her petal-pink dress wouldn’t brush against the doorframe and get dirty. The door closed behind them and a light went on in the living room. And then I was alone on the street with Prinz.
It was the time of day when people whose fates were entangled with the fates of others sat down to dinner, poured wine or wiped up spilled milk, held hands across the table or threw a dish on the kitchen floor in anger. I tried to feel glad at being unencumbered, free as a bird. I could do whatever I pleased with my evening now—Christmas Eve, no less—while all around me people fell in and out of love, like delivery trucks crashing into each other, backing up and crashing into each other again. Their wreckage was all around me.
Was there any place where the road was smooth and flat? Was there any place not pocked with the graves of dead love, the broken gears and stripped screws of lives lived off plumb? If such a place existed, I sure wanted to see it. But then I wondered how long I could walk that bare lane in the hot sun, whistling with my hands in my pockets, before I turned and ran like hell back to the beautiful junk heap. Because of course Nora and I were entangled too; I had her love and she had mine, though what that would mean in the months and years ahead I could not say.
I decided to take the long way back to my hotel. By now, I knew that any way I decided to go would be the long way. I could tell Prinz didn’t mind by the cheerful way he jangled his collar, and we made our way toward Macy’s to see the Christmas windows. In one was an enormous blue spruce like the tree I had seen in the Arthur mansion, sent to West Virginia by the first lady herself, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nora, the love of my life. But instead of strung popcorn and paper snowflakes, this tree was adorned with electric lights, delicate glass ornaments like the ones I had bought for my own tree just a year ago. Beneath the tree, on a red velvet skirt embroidered with reindeer, was a heap of gifts covered in silver and gold paper, each one crowned with a bow.
In Herald Square, a ragtag choir began singing for tips, off-key but jolly as hell—anything for a coin or two in these dark days—and it made me grin at my reflection in the window. I thought about John and Marina, and Glory June and Arthurdale, and Nora and me, and the truth socked me in the side of the head: The future is a wrapped present. Who knows what the hell is in there? You pay the price to get what you get, John had told me. But damn if I didn’t want it anyway, whatever it would be.
And so, on Christmas Eve, with a dreadful rendition of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” competing with the car horns on Thirty-Fourth Street, and a fine snow falling on my beloved avenues, sparkling in my old pal’s fur, I set off north, a cigarette keeping me warm, into the undiscovered country of days yet to come.