Blue Boy

Chester Poskozim’s younger brother, Ralphie, was born a blue baby, and though not expected to survive Ralphie miraculously grew into a blue boy. The blue was plainly visible beneath his blue-green eyes, smudges darker than shadows, as if he’d been in a fistfight or gotten into his mother’s mascara. Even in summer his lips looked cold. The first time I saw him, before I knew about his illness, I thought that he must have been sucking on a ballpoint pen. His fingers were smeared with the same blue ink.

On Sundays, the blueness seemed all the more prominent for the white shirt he wore to church. You could imagine that his body was covered with bruises, as if he was in far worse shape than Leon Szabo or Milton Pinero, whose drunken fathers regularly beat them. Unlike Szabo, who’d become vicious, a cat torturer, or Milton, who hung his head to avoid meeting your eyes and hardly ever spoke in order to hide his stammer, Ralphie seemed delighted to be alive. His smile, blue against his white teeth, made you grin back even if you hardly knew him and say, “Hey, how’s it going?”

“Going good.” Ralphie would nod, giving the thumbs-up.

When he made it to his eighth birthday, it was a big deal in our neighborhood, Little Village; it meant he’d get his wish, which was to make it to his First Holy Communion later that year, and whether Ralphie ever realized it or not, a lot of people celebrated with him. At corner taverns, like Juanita’s and the Zip Inn, men still wearing their factory steel-toes hoisted boilermakers to the Blue Boy. At St. Roman Church, women said an extra rosary or lit a vigil candle and prayed in English or Polish or Spanish to St. Jude, Patron of Impossible Causes.

And why not hope for the miracle to continue? In a way, Ralphie was what our parish had instead of a plaster statue of the Madonna that wept real tears or a crucified Christ that dripped blood on Good Friday.

For Ralphie’s birthday, I stopped by Pedro’s, the little candy store where we gathered on our way home from school whenever any of us had any money, and spent my allowance on a Felix the Cat comic, which I recalled had been my favorite comic book when I was eight, and gave it to his brother, Chester, to pass along.

Chester and I were in the same grade at St. Roman. We’d never really hung out together, though. He was a quiet guy, dressed as if his mother still picked out his clothes. He didn’t go in much for sports and wasn’t a brain either, just an average student who behaved himself and got his schoolwork done. If it wasn’t for his brother, the Blue Boy, no one would have paid Chester much attention, and probably I wouldn’t be remembering him now.

Looking back, I think Chester not only understood but accepted that his normal life would always seem inconsequential beside his little brother’s death sentence. He loved Ralphie and never tried to hide it. When Ralphie would have to enter the hospital, Chester would ask our class to pray for his brother, and we’d stop whatever we were doing to kneel beside our desks and pray with uncharacteristic earnestness. They were the same blood type, and sometimes Ralphie received Chester’s blood. Chester would be absent on those mornings and return to school in the afternoon with a Band-Aid over a vein and a pint carton of orange juice, with permission to sip it at his desk.

Outside the classroom, the two of them were inseparable. I’d see them heading home from Sunday mass, talking as if sharing secrets, laughing at some private joke. Once, passing by their house on Twenty-second Place, a side street whose special drowsy light came from having more than its share of trees, I noticed them sitting together on the front steps: Ralphie, leaning against his brother’s knees, his eyes closed, listening with what looked like rapture while Chester read aloud from a comic book. That was the reason I chose a comic as a gift instead of getting him something like bubble-gum baseball cards. His bruised, shivery-looking lips made me wonder if Ralphie was even allowed to chew gum.

 

The open affection between Chester and Ralphie wasn’t typical of the rough-and-tumble relationships between brothers in the neighborhood. Not that guys didn’t look out for their brothers, but there was often trouble between them, too. Across the street in the projects, Junior Gomez had put out the eye of his brother Nestor on Nestor’s birthday, playing Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Nestor’s birthday present, a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. In the apartment house just next door to ours, Terry Vandel’s baby brother, JoJo, wrapped in a blanket, fell from the second-story window to the pavement. Terry was supposed to have been baby-sitting for JoJo while their mother was at work. Mrs. Hobel, walking below, looked up to see the falling child. For weeks afterward, while JoJo was in the hospital with a fractured skull, Mrs. Hobel would break into tears repeating to anyone who would listen, “I could have caught him but I thought the other boy was throwing down a sack of garbage.”

As in the Bible, having a brother could be hazardous to your health.

For a while, the mention of twins or jealousy or even pizza would trigger a recounting of how, just across Western Avenue, in St. Michael’s parish, the Folloni twins, Gino and Dino—identically handsome, people said, as matinee idols—dueled one afternoon over a girl. It was fungo bat against weed sickle, until Gino went down and never got up. Dino, his face permanently rearranged, was still in jail. Their father owned Stromboli’s, a pizza parlor that was a mob hangout. Every time I’d ride my bike past the closed pizzeria on Oakley, and then past the sunken front yard where they’d fought, it would seem as if the street, the sidewalk, the light itself, had turned the maroon of an old bloodstain. I’d wonder how anyone knew for sure which twin had killed the other, if maybe it was really Dino who was dead and Gino doing time, ashamed to admit he was the one still alive. If they ever let him out, he’d go to visit his own grave to beg for forgiveness. Shadows the shade of mourning draped the brick buildings along that street, and finally I avoided riding there altogether.

Out on the streets, I kept an eye out for my brother, Mick, but at home our relationship was characterized by constant kidding and practical jokes that would sometimes escalate into fights. I was older and responsible for things getting out of control.

Once, on an impulse, while riding my bike with my brother perched dangerously on the handlebars the way friends rode—in fact, we called the handlebars the buddy seat—I hit the brakes without warning, launching Mick into midair. One second he was cruising and the next he was on the pavement. It would have been a comical bit of slapstick if he’d landed in whipped cream or even mud. I wasn’t laughing. I was horrified when I saw the way he hit the concrete—an impact like that would have killed Ralphie. Mick got up, stunned, bloody, crying.

“Jeez, you okay?” I asked. “Sorry, it was an accident.”

“You did that on purpose, you sonofabitch!” He was crying as much with outrage at how I’d betrayed the trust implicit in riding on the buddy seat as with pain.

I denied the accusation so strongly that I almost convinced myself what happened was an accident. But it was my fault, even though I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I’d done it out of the same wildness that made for an alliance between us—a bond that turned life comic at the expense of anything gentle. An impulsiveness that permitted a stupid, callous curiosity, the same dangerous lack of sense that had made me ride one day down Luther, a sunless side street that ran only a block, and, peddling at full speed, attempt to jump off my J. C. Higgins bike and back on in a single bounce.

It was a daredevil stunt I’d seen in Westerns when, to avoid gunfire, the cowboy hero, at full gallop, grabs the saddle horn, swings from the stirrups, and in a fluid movement hits the ground boots first and immediately bounds back into the saddle. As soon as I touched one foot to the street, the spinning pedal slammed into the back of my leg and I tumbled and skidded for what seemed half a block while the bike turned cartwheels over my body. Skin burned off my knees and palms. I’d purposely picked a street that was deserted to practice on. But a lady who could barely speak English poked her head out of a third-floor window and yelled, “Kid, you ho-kay?” She’d just witnessed what must have looked like some maniac trying to kill himself. I waved to her, smiled, and forced myself up. Amazingly, nothing was broken, not even my teeth, although I had a knot on my jaw from where the handlebars had clipped me with an uppercut. I collected my twisted bike from where it had embedded itself under a parked car. Had it been a horse, as I’d been pretending, I’d have had to shoot it. If someone had done to me what I’d just done to myself, I would have got the bastard back one way or another. My brother let me off easy.

But years later, when he was living in New York, studying acting with Brando’s famous teacher Lee Strasberg, Mick and I spent an evening together, drinking and watching a video of On the Waterfront. During the famous “I could have been a contender” scene, when Brando complains about his “one-way ticket to Palookaville” and tells his older brother, “Charley, it was you … . You was my brother, Charley. You should have looked out for me,” Mick turned to me, nodded, and smiled knowingly.

 

Chester was anything but a tough, yet despite his quiet way, you got the impression he’d lay his life on the line if anyone messed with Ralphie. You could see it in how he’d step out into a busy street, checking both directions for traffic before signaling Ralphie to cross. Or how, whenever a gang of guys playing keepaway with somebody’s hat, or maybe having a rock fight, barreled down the sidewalk, Chester would instinctively step between them and Ralphie.

That willingness to take a blow was an accepted measure of what the gang bangers called amor—a word usually accompanied by a thump on the chest to signify the feeling of connection from the heart-although in matters of amor, as in everything else, the willingness to give a blow was preferred. There were guys in the neighborhood who’d lay their lives on the line over an argument about bumming a smoke, guys capable of killing someone over a parking space or whose turn it was to buy the next round. There was each gang’s pursuit of Manifest Destiny: battles merciless and mindless as trench warfare over a block of turf. There was the casual way that mob goons across Western Avenue maimed and killed, a meanness both reflexive and studied—just so people didn’t forget that in capitalism on the street, brutality was still the least common denominator.

Not that there weren’t ample illustrations of that principle at the edge of the daily round of life where bag ladies combed alleys and the homeless, sleeping in junked cars, were found frozen to death in winter. Laid-off workmen became wife beaters in their newfound spare time; welfare mothers in the projects turned tricks to supplement the family budget; and it seemed that almost every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars.

The shout would go up—“Fight!”—and kids would flock in anticipation, especially if a couple of alkies were whaling at one another, because invariably loose change would fly from their pockets. The scramble for nickels and dimes would spawn secondary fights among us. And if we weren’t quick enough, we’d be scattered by Sharky, a guy who’d lost his legs in Korea, or riding the rails to Alaska, or to sharks off Vera Cruz, depending on which of his stories you wanted to believe. He was a little nuts, and people wondered if he remembered anymore himself where exactly his legs had been misplaced.

Sharky mopped up late at Juanita’s bar, but his main source of income was scavenging. He was also known as Gutterball for the way he’d rumble along alleys and curbs on a homemade contraption like a wide skateboard that he propelled with wooden blocks strapped over gloved hands, turning his hands into hooves. Late on summer nights, you could hear him clopping down the middle of deserted streets like a runaway stallion. Call him Gutterball to his face or get in his way, and he’d threaten to crack your kneecap with one of those wooden hooves.

It wasn’t an idle threat, he’d been in several brawls. They usually started with a question: “What the fuck you looking at, ostrich-ass?”

Anyone with legs was an ostrich to Sharky.

“Huh?” came the usual response.

But Sharky wouldn’t let it go at that. “Admit it, you rude motherfuck, you were staring at my bald spot, weren’t you?”

Sharky did have a bald spot. He’d roll slowly toward the confused ostrich, who’d begin edging backward as Sharky’s pace increased.

“You never seen a bald spot on wheels before? That it? I’m very fucken sensitive about my bald spot. Or is it something else about me that attracted your attention? Like, maybe, that I’m at a convenient height for giving head. You the kind of perv that wants a baldy bean doing wheelies while sucking your dick?”

By now, Sharky had gained momentum and was aimed for a collision if the ostrich didn’t take off running, which he usually did, with Sharky galloping after him, raging, “Run, you perverted, chickenshit biped!”

Sharky obviously enjoyed these confrontations. What nobody suspected was that such spectacles were only a substitute for what he really craved: a parade.

There was no shortage of parades in Little Village. Most ethnic groups had one, and that must have figured in Sharky’s thinking. St. Patrick’s brought out the politicians, and St. Joseph’s was also known locally as St. Polacik Day since people wore red, the background color for the white eagle on the Polish flag. I never understood what was particularly Polish about St. Joseph, but I bought a pair of fluorescent red socks especially for the occasion.

The Mexicans had two big holidays. The first was El Grito, a carnival at the end of summer, when as part of the festivities a wrestling ring was erected in the middle of Nineteenth Street. There’d be pony rides, and Mick and I would try to time it so as to be in the saddle when the El roared overhead because the ponies would rear.

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, was more solemn. Each December twelfth, no matter the weather, a procession wound through the streets led by a plaster likeness of the Virgin who’d appeared not to the Spanish conquerors but to a poor Indian, Juan Diego. She’d imprinted her mestiza image on his cloak—a miracle still there for all to see at the basilica in Mexico City. She’d told Juan Diego to gather flowers for her in a place where only cactus grew. When he did her bidding, he found a profusion of Castilian roses, and so all through Little Village people carried roses and sang hymns in Spanish to the Virgin whose delicate sandal had crushed the head of Quetzalcoatl, the snake god ravenous for human sacrifice. Even the alderman and precinct captains marched holding roses. And each year there was the fantastic rumor that the great Tito Guizar, the Mexican movie star of Rancho Grande— a singing cowboy like Roy Rogers—would arrive on a palomino to lead the procession through the barrio. His movies played at the Milo theater on Blue Island, where they showed films in Spanish. I’d study the posters I couldn’t read and wonder if his rearing horse was a celebrity in Mexico, the way that Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, was a star in America.

Then, one year, Tito Guízar actually showed. Down Washte-naw, heading for Twenty-second, he came riding right behind the Virgin, not on a palomino but on a prancing white horse whose mane blew in the feathery twirl of the early snowfall. The horse left pats of golden manure steaming in the street, while Tito Guizar, dressed in black leather chaps studded with silver, his guitar strapped across his back like a rifle, waved his sombrero, blessing the shivering crowd that lined the sidewalks to see him.

As the procession approached St. Roman Church, a motorcycle gunned to life, spooking the white horse, and while Tito Guízar whoaed at the reins, a Harley rumbled out of the alley beside the rectory. It was pulling Sharky, who was attached to the rear fender by a clothesline like a coachman commanding the reins of a carriage. The Harley was driven by Cyril Bombrowski, once known as Bombs. He’d been a motorcycle maniac until, doing seventy down an alley, he’d collided with a garbage truck. He had a metal plate in his head and didn’t ride much anymore, as he was prone to seizures since the wipeout. Now people called him Spaz, and when he rode down the street, it was a tradition that whoever saw him first would yell a Paul Revere—like warning: “Spaz Attack!”

No one yelled this time. Behind Spaz and Sharky, a procession of the disabled from the parish emerged from the alley. A couple of World War II vets, mainstays from the bar at the VFW Club, one with a prosthetic hook and the other with no discernible wound other than the alcoholic staggers; and Trib, the blind newspaper vendor; and a guy who delivered pulp circulars, known only as—what else?—the Gimp, pushing his wheelchair for support; and Howdy, who’d been named after Howdy Doody because his palsy caused him to move like a marionette with tangled strings.

It was a parade of at most a dozen, but it seemed larger-enough of a showing so that onlookers could imagine the battalions of wounded soldiers who weren’t there, and the victims of accidents, industrial and otherwise, the survivors of polio and strokes, all the exiles who avoided the streets, who avoided the baptism of being street-named after their afflictions, recluses who kept their suffering behind doors, women like Maria Savoy, who’d been lighting a water heater when it exploded, or Agnes Lutensky, who remained cloistered years after her brother blew off half her face with a shotgun during an argument over a will.

With their canes, crutches, and the wheelchair, it looked more like a pilgrimage to Lourdes than a parade. They’d been assembled by Sharky and now marched, although that’s hardly an accurate word for their gait, beneath the banner of a White Sox pennant clamped in a mop stick that the Gimp had mounted on his beat-up wheelchair. The Gimp never sat in his chair but rather used it like a cart, piling it with bags of deposit bottles and other commodities he collected while delivering the circulars no one read. Today, the chair was empty of junk.

Their flag bore no symbol of allegiance, no slogan of their cause other than “Go Sox,” but what must have fueled Sharky’s outrage all along became suddenly obvious: they were at once the most visible and the most invisible of minorities. Instead of bit players out of the Gospels, fodder for miracles, the Halt and the Lame were in for the long haul, which required surviving day to day.

As they passed the church, Sharky raised a wooden hoof, not in blessing or salute—more as if scoring the winning goal—and on cue those parading behind him raised their fists. At that moment, Ralphie, wearing a cap and bundled in a checked scarf, stepped out of the crowd lining the curb, catching everyone by surprise, even Chester, who couldn’t do anything more than exclaim, “Hey, where you going?”

By then Ralphie had put on a burst of speed—the first time I’d ever seen him run—and caught up to the Gimp, climbed up on the wheelchair, and raised his fist, too.

 

Ralphie died a few weeks later, on Gwiazdka. The word means “Little Star” in Polish, and it’s what Christmas Eve was sometimes called in the parish. At midnight mass kids too young to be altar boys would file up the aisle to the manger carrying goldpainted stars on sticks. Had he been alive, Ralphie would have been among them. He was buried in the navy blue suit already purchased for the First Holy Communion he would have made that spring.

That was an observation made repeatedly at the wake, and afterward, at the Friday night bingo games in the church basement, and at bakeries and butcher shops and pizzerias and taquerias and beauty parlors and barbershops and corner bars: “Poor little guy didn’t make it to his Holy Communion,” someone would say.

And someone would likely answer, “They should of made an exception and let him make it early.”

“Nah, he didn’t want to be no exception. That’s how he was. He wanted to make it with his class.”

“Yeah, he was a tough little hombre, never wanted special treatment, never complained.”

“You know it. Always thumbs-up with him.”

“God should of let him make it.”

“Hey! You start with that kind of talk and there’s no stopping.”

“Yeah, but just for this once, if I was God, that kid walks up there for his First Communion. Then, if it’s his time, so be it.”

“If you was God we’d all still be waiting for the Second Day of Creation while you slept off your hangover from the Big Kaboom. God knew he didn’t want to be no exception. He made him that way.”

“Yeah, he made him with blue fucking skin, too.”

“Hey, maybe that was God’s gift to us. Somebody too sweet for the long term in this world. Somebody to be an example—‘A little child shall lead them,’ like Father Fernando said at the service.”

“Talk about hungover, that priest was still shitfaced. The night before he was pounding tequila at Juanita’s till they eighty-sixed us out into the goddamn blizzard—snow piled so fucking deep we couldn’t hardly get out the door. Me and Paulie have to help him back to the church, then Paulie falls in a snowbank, and while I’m digging Paulie out, Father Kumbaya decides to take a leak. I look up and there’s our new padre waving his peter in the middle of Twenty-sixth.”

“So, big deal, he’s a human being. It was a beautiful service, he did a good job. I thought that older brother was a little weird, though, guarding the casket like a rottweiler. Somebody shoulda told him it was all right to cry. What’s his name, anyway?”

“I don’t remember.”

“That little Ralphie was a saint. Don’t be surprised if someday they don’t canonize him.”

“I think there’s gotta be like miracles for that.”

“Yo, that kid was a living miracle. Maybe that’s it—why God put him here—what Little Village will be famous for: the Blue Boy! Mark my words, people will come from all over like they do to places in the Old Country … Our Lady of Fatima, the Little Infant of Prague. Know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, somebody always figures out how to make a buck off it.”

 

A year later there were yet to be miracles, at least none I’d heard about. But the Blue Boy wasn’t forgotten. As we approached another Christmas vacation and the first anniversary of Ralphie’s death, Sister Lucy, our eighth-grade teacher, assigned a composition on the meaning of Christmas, and dedicated it to Ralphie’s memory. Chester was in our class, and at the mention of Ralphie, Sister Lucy smiled gently in his direction, but he just stared at his hands. He’d been a loner since his brother’s death, and all but mute in school. We’d heard the rumor that Chester periodically showed up, only to be repeatedly turned away, at the blood bank on Kedzie where the alkies went to trade their blood for wine money.

“Do your best,” Sister Lucy instructed our class. “This will be the last Christmas composition you will ever write.”

The Christmas composition was an annual assignment at St. Roman, required from each class above third grade. The pieces judged best received prizes, and the top prize winner was read aloud at the Christmas pageant. Not that there really was any competition for top prize: it was reserved for Camille Estrada. She was the best writer in the school. Probably, before Camille, the concept of such a thing as a best writer didn’t even exist at St. Roman. Camille was a prodigy. By fifth grade she’d already written several novels in her graceful A+ cursive and bound them in thread-stitched covers cut from the stays of laundered shirts. They were illustrated—she was a gifted artist as well. And they were filed, complete with checkout cards, in the shelves beside Black Beauty, Call of the Wild, and the other real books in the school library.

Camille’s early works, mostly about animals, had titles like The Squirrel of Douglas Park and The Stallion and the Butterfly. I never actually checked them out, but I read them on the sly one week when I was exiled to the library for detention. Camille loved horses, and they often suffered terribly in her stories. They were the subjects of many of her illustrations: huge, muscular creatures with flared nostrils, often rearing, some winged, some unicorns.

By sixth grade she’d taught herself to type, and then the writing really poured from her. Camille became founder, publisher, editor, and chief reporter of our first school newspaper, To Change the World, as well as translator for an occasional Spanish edition. She represented St. Roman in the Archdiocese of Chicago Essay Contest, writing on why a Catholic code of censorship was needed for pop songs and movies like the Brigitte Bardot film And God Created Woman. It was a foreign film that would never have played in our neighborhood anyway. Still, although none of us had ever seen Bardot on screen, the B.B. of her initials—which also conveniently stood for Big Boobs—mysteriously appeared as a cheer scribbled on the school walls: BB zizboombah! When Camille’s censorship essay won, she got a mention in the Metro section of the Tribune.

At the annual school talent show, where “Lady of Spain” pumped from accordions and virtuosos pounded “Heart and Soul” on the out-of-tune upright to the clatter of tap dancers, Camille would read an original poem written for the occasion. She wasn’t a dramatic reader, but there was something inherently dramatic about her standing before the boomy mike, without a costume or an instrument to hide behind, her eyes glued to the page while she read in a quiet, clear voice.

I liked it when she read aloud because I could watch her without seeming to stare. I’d always been fascinated by the way her myopic eyes illuminated her thin face. Her long lashes drew attention like those on a doll. Beneath them, her liquid, dark eyes gazed out unblinking, serious, enormous. Her voice was colored with a slight Spanish accent. She spoke in a formal way that sounded as if she was cautiously considering each word in English, a language in which she was so fluent on the page. Her reserve made her seem older, though not physically older, like some of the boys who already had faint mustaches, guys like Brad Norky, who actually was older, having been held back. Once, at a talent show, I overheard two elderly women talking about the way Camille had read her poem about the ecstasy of St. Teresa.

“She has an old soul,” one of the women observed, and the other said, “I know what you mean.”

Even back then, in a way, I knew what she meant, too.

From seventh grade on Camille wore rouge that looked artificial against the caramel shade of her skin and made her appear feverish. She got glasses that year: ivory-sparkle cat frames that matched the barrettes clamping back the thick black hair she’d previously worn in braids. She was no longer quite flatchested, though the rose-colored bra outlined beneath the white blouse of her school uniform hardly seemed necessary. She could have used braces.

In seventh grade, a gang of us proudly calling ourselves the Insane Fuckups would sneak off at lunch to our boys’ club—the doorway of an abandoned dry cleaner’s where we’d smoke Luckies, spit, and discuss things like the rumor that some of the girls were washing their school blouses over and over to make the fabric thin in order to show off their underclothes. I made the mistake of mentioning that even Camille Estrada’s bra was showing, and, as if dumbfounded, Norky asked, “No shit? Estrada has titties! You think she might have a hairy pussy, too?” Then he burst into mocking laughter.

Even my best friend, Angel Falcone, couldn’t resist breaking up. “Instead of BB’s she’s got bb’s—bbitas,” he said, making his voice tiny. “Hey, maybe she’ll publish the news in her paper.”

“Headline!” Norky shouted. “Stop the presses!” and with the chalk he carried to graffiti up our doorway, he printed in huge letters on the sidewalk: ESTRADA HAS bb’s.

He chalked it on the graffitied tunnel wall of the viaduct on Rockwell, and along the bricks of the buildings we passed, and on the asphalt of the street where the little girls drew hopscotch courts alongside the school. It was one of those phrases that inexplicably catches on, and for the next couple of weeks it was every-where—in the boys’ bathroom, at the Washtenaw playground, on the concrete basketball court at the center of the projects: ESTRADA HAS bb’s.

In class, when I’d sneak a glance at her, it seemed her rouged cheeks burned, but perhaps that was only a projection of my secret shame.

Near the end of seventh grade, my desk was moved out into the corridor, where I was banished after topping one hundred demerits in conduct. Then, our teacher that year, Sister Mary Donatille—the only nun who insisted we say the Mary in her name—introduced Partners in Christ. It was an experimental program, borrowing, perhaps, from AA, in that it teamed habitual bad boys with sponsors—good girls—so as to give the boys a taste of the rewards of behaving. I can’t say what it was for the girls, torture probably; for the boys it was a subtle form of humiliation. Camille was assigned to be my Partner in Christ.

At St. Roman, two kinds of kids stayed after school, those in detention and the teachers’ pets who were invited to help the nuns clean the classrooms. Detention time was spent copying chapters from the New Testament, but thanks to Sister Mary Donatille’s experiment, instead of rewriting the Apocalypse, I got to clean the blackboard erasers with Camille. It was an honorary task: only pets were entrusted to take the erasers out behind the school and beat them clean against the wall. Although I’d been reassigned a seat beside Camille in class, we still hadn’t spoken. We stood together, engulfed in chalk dust and an uncomfortable silence relieved only by the muffled thud of felt against brick. In blocky chalk impressions I pounded out F-U-

“I really like your vocabulary,” Camille said.

“Real funny.”

“No, I mean it,” she said. “You have a neat imagination.”

I looked at her, too puzzled to respond. I didn’t know if she was putting me down or putting me on or applying some kind of condescending psychology, or if she was just spacey.

“That story you wrote for Christmas. About the ant. It was so cool. I wanted to publish it in the paper, but it was too long.”

She was referring to “The Enormous Gift,” which I’d written back in sixth grade for the Christmas competition. I frequently missed getting my homework in, but I’d found myself writing the story with an excited concentration I hadn’t associated with schoolwork. The assignment that year had been to write a story about a gift brought to the baby Jesus in his stable at Bethlehem. In my story, the gift was a crumb of bread that weighed a thousand times more than my narrator, an ant, but he hoisted it nonetheless, and after narrow escapes involving spiders, sparrows, the hooves of oxen, and soles of sandals, he finally crept into the manger to offer his gift.

“After you read it I kept thinking about it and saw what you meant,” Camille said. “How it was like a little miracle for the ant to bring the first bread to Jesus, who’d later make the big miracles of the loaves and fishes, and turn bread and wine into his body and blood.”

I’d never thought about any of that. To me it was just the adventure of an ant.

“The Enormous Gift” had been chosen to be read aloud in class, but it didn’t win the school competition. Camille won with “O Little Star of Centaurus,” a story in which the Christmas star was revealed to be a spaceship in the shape of a winged horse. I couldn’t help visualizing it as the fiery red Pegasus trademark for Mobil gasoline. It had traveled from the constellation Centaurus, where light-years ago Christ had appeared to redeem an advanced but brutal race of hooved aliens. The Centaurians, now converted to brotherhood and peace, had learned that Christ was traveling through the universe, redeeming world after world, and so in homage they followed him through time and space to witness each reappearance. The gleam of their ship was the star that guided the Wise Men, who in each new world came bringing gifts on each new night of Christ’s infinitely repeated birth.

“Your story knocked my socks off,” I said, not adding that, ever since I’d heard her read it, I’d wondered if the Christ on Centaurus had hooves like the other Centaurians. Her story didn’t say, but it posed problems for his crucifixion.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I thought yours should have won.”

“No way. They should make yours into a movie. How’d you make that up?”

“How’d you think of the ant?”

“I don’t know. I like to read about bugs and stuff,” I said, not mentioning how during the summers I’d sneak off down the railroad tracks to the Sanitary Canal, where I hid a homemade net for collecting butterflies.

“I never purposely try to make things up,” Camille said, sounding suddenly proper, the way she did when she spoke in class. “It just happens. It’s not about made-up anyway, it’s about feeling.”

She looked at me for agreement, but the transformation in her voice put me on guard.

“It’s about feeling, you know?” she repeated. “That’s what’s important,” she insisted, as if I’d disagreed.

She went back to cleaning the erasers, clapping them together like cymbals, the poofs of chalky smoke surrounding her bronzed by the rays that shafted through the clouds massed over the convent. She stared at the two chalk-dust letters I’d pounded on the bricks, and back at me, then beat in a blocky C.

“Want to collaborate?” she asked.

I stood there, confused again, refusing to admit to myself that she intimidated me, but feeling hopelessly immature beside her all the same.

“So, come on,” she said and beat out the slanted upper bar of the missing K.

I beat an impression of the straight staff. She added the lower slanted bar. Not much chalk remained on the erasers, and they left only the faded ghost of the word. I became conscious that my heart was beating.

She read our collaboration aloud as if it were composed of air flowing across her overbite, as if a whisper re-created its faintness on the bricks.

“Don’t look so surprised. You don’t know what I think,” she said, then added, “I have stories I don’t show anyone.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t think someone should be blamed for stories any more than they should have to confess their dreams. Boys don’t have to confess their dreams. Do you?”

It was something I’d never thought about, and I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. If she was referring to wet dreams, they were something I’d yet to experience. Later, in high school, I’d think back to the two of us behind the school and realize that was what she probably meant, but at the time all I did was shrug.

She hunched her skinny shoulders, mimicking me. “Maybe I’d tell you if I thought you could keep a secret,” she said.

“Sure I can;” I told her.

“It would have to be a trade. First you have to tell me something you want me to keep secret.”

“What if I don’t have a secret?”

“Everybody has. But if you’re an exception then make one up.”

I knew that collecting butterflies wasn’t the kind of secret she was after. Even at the time, it seemed strange to me that we’d been in school together for years and hardly talked and now suddenly we were having a conversation of the kind I’d never had before with a girl or anyone, a conversation that, whether Camille knew it or not, was already a secret I would keep. I laughed as a way out of answering.

“What do you have to do penance for?” she asked.

“You mean the old five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys?” I said. In my experience that was the penance no matter what you confessed. I didn’t know if it was the same for girls or not.

Camille looked at me unamused. “Have you ever written a story that was a sin, one you had to do penance for?”

“Penance for a story?”

She gathered the erasers into an unbalanced stack and turned to go inside, leaving me to pick up the erasers that dropped behind her. “You’re a big help,” she said sarcastically but added, “Honest. I knew you weren’t a loser.”

That night, I went to sleep thinking about her—another secret—and looking forward to the following day, when we’d go out together to beat the erasers. I didn’t know what I’d tell her, but I’d tell her something. But next morning, during the Pledge of Allegiance, before class even began, Diane Kunzel, Norky’s Partner in Christ, let out a scream. Norky had Magic-Markered a smiley face on a white sausage-shaped balloon he’d worked through his open fly as if exposing himself. Sister Mary Donatille attacked him, slashing at his greasy d.a. haircut and stabbing at his balloon with the pointer she used during geography when she stood before the pull-down map that was green for Christian countries and pink for Communist ones. Partners in Christ came to a bitter end that morning.

“Don’t cry, girls, these boys would try the patience of an angel,” Sister Mary Donatille said.

Camille wasn’t crying. She showed her teeth in a quick, regretful overbite smile and fluttered her fingers goodbye as I packed up. We boys were reassigned to seats at the perimeter of class, and for the remainder of seventh grade I never really spoke with Camille again.

But I still thought about her when in eighth grade we were asked to write our last Christmas composition and dedicate it to Ralphie. I wanted to write a story, not a composition, one that would be read aloud, so that Camille would hear it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a story to write. I wanted a story that came out of nowhere, one I could get excited about the way I had when I’d written from the viewpoint of an ant, although writing about an ant seemed wimpy now. Sister Lucy had made it clear that dedicating our compositions to Ralphie didn’t mean we were to write about him. Simply writing, as usual, about the true meaning of Christmas was all that was required. Yet, when I thought about Ralphie, already dead a year, tales about an ant or a red-nosed reindeer or a snowman come to life seemed the childish fantasies of a daydreamer, a term my father applied to me when he was feeling particularly contemptuous of my behavior.

“You better wake up and smell the coffee,” he’d warn.

Getting desperate, I tried to write a story my father had told once about the first Christmas he’d spent as a child after his father had been sent to the state mental hospital, and how on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve he met a boy named Teddy Kanik, who became his best friend for life. It wasn’t like any story my father had told me before. He told it after I’d accused him of being a Scrooge because of his cheapskate way of shopping for a Christmas tree. Before I could get to the story as my father told it to me, it seemed necessary to explain the annual ordeal that shopping with him for a Christmas tree had become. Each Christmas season, Mick and I would trudge after him from one tree lot to another in the cold. He was a comparison shopper. He insisted we drag along a sled for hauling back the tree, the way we had when we were little kids. Mick and I would argue over who got stuck pulling the old red Flexible Flyer, its rusted runners rattling over the partially shoveled sidewalks. It had become our family tradition—a terribly embarrassing one. My father loved to bargain, and everything, including the way he’d browse the rows of Christmas trees, shaking his head at their overpriced and undernourished condition, was part of a master strategy. His opening gambit on anything he bought, Christmas trees not excluded, was always the phrase “So how much you soak for it …”

That phrase was as far as I got in writing my father’s story, because it occurred to me that if the story was read aloud in class, it would be as embarrassing as shopping for a tree with my father. Worse, each sentence I wrote about the shopping seemed to take me further away from the story as my father told it, and I knew why I was disgressing, treating it as a joke: his story about meeting Teddy Kanik one Christmas Eve so long ago depressed me. It seemed to have happened in a different world—the Chicago where my father had grown up as an immigrant, only blocks away but in an alternative universe, one forever sunk in a Great Depression. That wasn’t a feeling I wanted to bring into a class where I had a reputation to uphold as a clown. I thought about Camille confiding that she’d written stories she kept secret, and realized my father’s story was better kept a secret, too.

By now it was late. I probably would have given up if all I’d wanted was to impress Camille, but writing a story was the only way I could imagine communicating with her. Despite what Sister Lucy had said about simply writing about the meaning of Christmas, I didn’t seem able to concentrate on a story dedicated to Ralphie if he wasn’t in it, so I tried writing about the funeral.

I hadn’t ridden in the line of cars that left for the cemetery after Ralphie’s requiem mass, but I’d stood on the church steps and watched the confusion of spinning tires and men in dark topcoats rocking a hearse piled with snow and flowers out of a rut along the curb. Then, the taillights of the cortege slowly disappeared down Washtenaw into a whiteout. I envisioned their headlights burrowing through the blizzard as they followed the hearse up Milwaukee Avenue, way out to the Northwest Side, where I imagined the snow was even deeper. I’d heard how, when they finally reached St. Adalbert Cemetery, they had trouble finding the grave site. In my story, the drifts were so deep that all but the crosses of the tallest monuments were buried. In that expanse of white, it was impossible to find Ralphie’s plot, but as the procession of cars wound along a plowed road, they came to a place I described as “an oasis of green in a Sahara of snow.” There, gaping from exposed grass, was a freshly dug grave. At my grandfather Mike’s funeral I’d noticed a robin with a worm in its beak fly from his open grave, so in my story birds—robins, doves, seagulls—flew out of the hole as if a cage door had opened, and circled cawing overhead. When I reread that sentence, I scratched out “robins” and wrote in “blue jays.” Only after the graveside service did snow drift over Ralphie’s plot, which was marked—as I’d heard it actually was—with a simple gray stone that made no mention of his being a blue boy. But in my story, when the snow melted in spring, his gravestone had turned blue. I tried different shades: turquoise, cornflower, Prussian, all the blues in a giant 104 box of Crayolas. None seemed right.

It was long past my bedtime. Mick had gone to sleep in the room we shared, where I’d been writing cross-legged on my bed, so I’d relocated to the kitchen table. My father looked in on me before he turned in, obviously amazed to see me slaving over homework.

“Don’t burn that midnight oil too late, sonnyboy,” he cautioned.

Quiet in our flat was when the motor of the refrigerator grew audible. I could hear its hum, and the toilet trickling, the crinkle of cooling radiators and, from down the hall, a harmonica, maybe Shakey Horton or Junior Wells still faintly playing on the bedroom radio tuned to the black rhythm and blues station that Mick and I listened to on the sly before we went to sleep.

“I’m going down to the basement and put my blue light on,” Sam Evans, the DJ, would announce at midnight.

What blue was that gravestone emerging from the dirty snow in spring? As blue as the blue light in Sam Evans’s basement? The ghostly blue of Blue Island rising from the lake? Or the cold blue of the lake itself? Norky once described it as “turn-your-balls-blue” in an oral presentation. For a time after that we referred to Lake Michigan as Lake Blueballs.

It had actually offended Camille. “Sometimes people look but don’t see what’s beautiful all around us, like the lake,” she wrote in To Change the World. “It’s a melted glacier, an Ice Age turned to sweet water. I love its taste.”

I slipped my jacket on and went out the back way and walked down the alley that led to an Ice Age so fierce the air felt crystallized, as if the snow tailing off the roofs might be flecks of frozen oxygen. It took a conscious effort to inhale its sharpness, yet instead of cursing the cold, I had a thought that maybe the purpose of winter was to make you realize with every breath that you were alive and wanted to stay that way. I thought about Ralphie and the other kids I knew who already were dead, some from accidents, some, like Peanuts Bizzaro, murdered. Peanuts had seemed indestructible. In winter, we’d all go to watch him fight at the steamy Boys’ Club gym. He was a boxer who’d prided himself on not getting hit. He made boxing something daringly beautiful, like diving off a high board. One night I stood in an audience of guys outside the Cyclone fence surrounding the warehouse lot on Rockwell—a lot with floodlights mounted too high to bust with rocks—where Peanuts was dancing, jabbing, throwing combinations, and repeating, “I’m fast, I’m flashy,” though under those lights and the bluish shadows they threw he appeared to move in slow motion as he methodically beat the piss out of a much beefier kid from the Ambros. The kid, called Dropout by the gang buddies cheering him on, had wanted to box at the Boys’ Club, but he was obviously heavier than Peanuts’s welterweight class, and when the boxing coach refused to let them put the gloves on, Peanuts offered to take it outside. Dropout wasn’t even trying to box anymore. He was grabbing and kicking, and Peanuts was nicking him with his fists, calm and cool as a matador, asking, “Am I fast or what?” Then, from outside the fence, came a single pop that echoed off the stacks of oil drums. Guard still up, Peanuts went down to one knee. Dropout kicked him over, then scaled the fence and took off with his buddies.

Peanuts tried to climb the fence but slid back. Out of nowhere, his older brother, Tony, came running and nearly cleared the eight-foot fence in a jump. He wrapped his Levi’s jacket around Peanuts, who was shivering, turning blue under the lighting, and repeating, “No fair, no fucken fair.”

Ralphie never had a fighting chance. I thought of him, and of Peanuts, of Gino Folloni and the others all buried under earth frozen too hard to break with a spade. They couldn’t feel the cold because they were the cold. Maybe they could hear the wind, but they couldn’t see how even colder than earth the boulder of moon looked through the flocked branches of back yard trees. I stopped, made a snowball, hurled it, and the snow knocked from the tree maintained the shape of branches in midair for a moment before disintegrating. I wasn’t wearing gloves, and my hands burned numb. Suddenly, I felt choked up, and I started to run as if I could outrun the feeling—which, in fact, was what I did, sprinting down three blocks of alleys without stopping to check the cross streets for traffic, but there weren’t any cars and finally, when my nostrils and lungs felt at once frostbitten and on fire and I could no longer remember why I was running or if there even was a reason, I stopped and turned around, jogging home under streetlights that looked as if they, too, should have been exhaling steam.

The kitchen was filled with a dizzying warmth. It would have felt warm if the only sources of heat were the overhead light and the humming refrigerator motor. There, on the gray Formica table, lay my smeary blue ballpoint pen and three-holed loose-leaf papers, my story, and the scratch paper on which I’d listed various kinds of blue. I tried to reread my story and couldn’t. The only thing left to make it feel right was to compress it in both hands like a snowball before throwing it into the trash bag under the sink.

Everyone handed in compositions but Chester and me. Sister Lucy didn’t say anything to Chester, but she told me to sign my name on a blank sheet of paper, title it “Christmas Composition,” and below that to write “Dedicated to Ralphie.”

On the last day of class before Christmas vacation, when she returned the compositions, she handed the blank paper to me marked with a red F. Written in red ink was the comment “I see that your gift this Christmas was an ENORMOUS nothing.”

After returning the papers, Sister Lucy placed a scratchy record of carols on the portable turntable, and while it played she announced what we all already knew, that Camille’s essay would represent our class at the Christmas Pageant that year. As was customary, Sister Lucy asked Camille to read her story aloud for our class. Camille rose to read at her desk, but Sister motioned her to the front. Camille was to be our valedictorian, too, the first one ever at St. Roman, and Sister Lucy had begun coaching Camille on her oral delivery in preparation for her speech at graduation.

“A Christmas Carol for Ralphie: A True Story,” Camille read, her quiet voice in competition with the “Ave Maria.” She enunciated carefully, eyes glued to the page, rouge burning on her cheeks. She appeared to be overheating, and she partially unbuttoned the navy blue cardigan she’d taken to wearing over her school uniform.

“Try looking up at your audience from time to time,” Sister Lucy suggested. “Eye contact, that’s the secret.”

Camille’s composition opened with the sound of prancing hooves: not reindeer on a rooftop, she told us, but Tito Guizar on the white stallion following the Virgin down Washtenaw. Listening to her re-create the scene, I wondered if she’d been there. I didn’t remember seeing her, but there had been a crowd of people on the sidewalk watching Tito Guizar. When she came to the part about Sharky leading his parade out of the alley, she looked up at us, her audience, and asked, “What if Charles Dickens, the author of A Christmas Carol—one of the greatest writers in the history of the world—was there in the crowd?”

She dropped her gaze back to her paper. “I think I saw him there that afternoon,” she said, then deliberately making eye contact, asked, “If Dickens can transport us in time back to London, why can’t we transport him to Chicago?”

Maybe eye contact was the secret, because it seemed as if she was asking me the question.

“You don’t have to be transported to London on Christmas Eve a century ago to know that, as Dickens wrote, ‘the business of Mankind is Man.’ You don’t have to be visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. But if you were, who would your ghost of Christmas Past be?” she asked. “Each of you has one. What would your spirit of Christmas Present look like?”

She paused as if waiting for an answer, and though I now realized her technique was to make eye contact whenever she asked a question, the question nonetheless seemed directed at me, as if there were a secret connection between us.

Before I could think who my ghost might be, Norky turned in his seat a row over and whispered, “Brigitte Bardot,” then shook his fist as if jerking off and made a demented face, which confirmed the ill effects of masturbation. Otherwise, the class was quiet, everyone intent but Chester, who’d buried his head in his arms as if asleep at his desk.

“Maybe the ghost might be disguised as a blind man who sells newspapers or, instead of dragging chains, comes rattling on a little cart with hooves strapped to his hands,” Camille suggested.

However different our ghosts might be, she said, she guessed that everyone in our class had the same Tiny Tim—Ralphie—and that we needed to be inspired by his example to change the world. To change the world, we first had to change ourselves. We had to make Christmas in our hearts and love one another.

Norky turned, caught my attention, and raised a sheet of paper on which in big letters he’d scrawled: “Estrada has BB’s.”

I hated to admit he was right—maybe it was an optical illusion, but whenever Camille paused for breath, her white blouse beneath her blue sweater seemed to strain against the swell of her breasts as if she were developing before our eyes.

She took a deep, breast-heaving breath and said that a blue boy was not so different from Tiny Tim with his crutch. And that Tiny Tim with his crutch was not so different from Jesus with a cross. She said that on that day last December when he ran to join the band of disabled marchers, Ralphie “mounted the wheelchair like a prince assuming his throne.” She said he raised his blue fist not in triumph or, as some claimed after he died, to wave goodbye, but as if to cheer as Tiny Tim would, “God bless us every one!”

“That’s not what happened,” Chester said quietly.

He lifted his head from his arms and, without asking permission, half rose at his front-row desk.

“Chester, do you want to add something?” Sister Lucy asked, giving him the floor, though it wasn’t necessary, because Camille had immediately stopped reading and now stood as if trapped before the class, more uneasy than I’d ever seen her.

Chester sat back down. “Lots of little kids chase parades,” he said. His voice trembled. “How come for once in his life Ralphie couldn’t just do what other kids do without somebody making it a big deal?”

“Of course he could,” Sister Lucy said. “What Camille meant was—”

“She shouldn’t make stuff up about him,” Chester interrupted, rising to his feet with a force that jarred his desk and sent the needle on Sister’s portable player skipping across vinyl. “He wasn’t joining anything!” he shouted at Camille. “He wasn’t like them. His fist wasn’t blue. That’s bullshit. What do you know?” he demanded. “You don’t know shit! And he hated being called Blue Boy. That wasn’t his goddamn name. He wasn’t some fucking freak. He wasn’t some crip in a story. He didn’t want your fucking feeling sorry for him. We don’t need it. What do you know? You don’t know fucking dogshit! Go fuck your four-eyed self!” he yelled after her as Camille ran from the room.

 

“How much you soak for it?” my father asked, studying the tree with a characteristic combination of suspicion and contempt.

His appraisal was accurate, it wasn’t much of a tree. The lots were already picked over. Each year we’d shop later in December in order to get a better deal. I’d begun to suspect that, if he could, he would buy a tree on sale after Christmas the way he bought Christmas cards.

“You don’t unload these trees soon and you’ll be stuck with them. You won’t be able to give them away.” As usual, he marshaled his arguments before getting down to talking turkey, applying what he called “psychology,” even though the kid he was bargaining with didn’t own the lot. He was a sullen-looking teenager in a hood who kept his eyes on his own stamping feet. The unclasped buckles of his galoshes jangled; I could smell the resin on his oversize canvas mittens. While we’d wandered through what was left of the tiny pine forest, he hadn’t bothered to leave the flickering, illusory warmth of the garbage can where he stood smoking a cigarette and burning boughs.

During summer, lots like this were eyesores, clotted with trash, ragweed thrusting from bricks and broken bottles. But each December they were transformed—strung with colored bulbs and plastic pennants like used car lots. A horn speaker, blaring maniacally as any from an ice-cream truck in July, crackled “Here Comes Santa Claus.”

“Maybe I’d go a fin on this one,” my father grudgingly offered.

“I don’t make the prices, mo’,” the kid told him.

“Well, just between us, what do you think it’s really worth?” my father asked. “If you were shopping for it.”

“Whatever the tag says, mo’.”

That second mo’ caught my attention. The first time, I’d thought maybe he’d mumbled “man,” but it was mo’ as in mo-fo as in motherfucker. I wondered if he was high. My father seemed not to have noticed. His general obliviousness to gang etiquette in the neighborhood had always alarmed me.

“Suppose the tag fell off,” my father prodded. “Trees don’t grow in nature with price tags, you know.”

The kid shrugged as if it wasn’t worth talking about. “Look, mo’, you buy it or you don’t.”

“I offered a fin … with an extra six bits in it for you if you saw the stump,” my father said, conspiratorially.

“Why you come here and insult me for, mo’?”

“What? You want I go see what the competition has to offer? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but they got a very nice selection of trees down the block, and another down the block from that,” my father said, not letting on that we’d already cased every lot in an eight-block radius before he decided this lot had the cheapest trees—no doubt because they were the scruffiest. “There’s more trees out there than customers,” my father informed him, amused by the irrefutable laws of capitalism now working to his advantage.

“So go fucken waste their time.”

Mick and I looked at each other and back at the guy.

“What you looking at? How you like I shove that sled up your ass, kid?” he asked me.

We walked off, me dragging the sled.

“I didn’t like his attitude,” my father said.

I didn’t say anything. I was furious. All the other times my father had embarrassed me returned in a rush: the way he’d stop his beater in traffic to pick a piece of scrap he thought might be worth something off the street; how I’d unpack my lunch in school to find he’d made me what my friends called “a puke on white”—last night’s chop suey on now dissolved slices of Wonder bread; how at Maxwell Street, or Jewtown, as it was called with typical Chicago ethnic sensitivity, at the outdoor market my father haunted where endless haggling was the rule, while I tried on trousers behind the makeshift dressing room of a windblown sheet, he’d yell, “Do they fit in the crotch?” I was banging the sled over curbs as if yanking the leash on a dog I was trying to kill.

“Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum,” Mick hummed to himself as he had the entire time we’d been out. “Me and my drum.”

“Hey, take it easy on that sled,” my father said. “If you can’t make something, don’t break it.”

I gave the sled a jerk that slammed it along a building so its metal runners sparked off the bricks, and my father stopped, challenging me to try it again. “Someone having a problem here?”

“You are really a Scrooge, mo’,” I told him, and braced for an attack that, this time, didn’t come.

Later that night, while Mick helped Moms bake gingerbread, my father and I strung the Bubble Lites on a Scotch pine to a burble of carols courtesy of the Lawrence Welk orchestra. It was the first long-needled pine we’d ever had, and it seemed exotic—a pedigreed Persian cat of a tree. It still had pinecones on it. The bushy needles made stringing the lights trickier, my father observed, then we continued working in silence.

“Be a good night for some homemade eggnog,” he offered. “The real thing made the old-fashioned way.” He prided himself on his eggnog; it was the best I’ve ever had. He began talking about his father—my grandfather—whom he never mentioned and whom I’d never really met. I thought of him as my father’s father rather than as my grandfather. My father remembered how at Christmastime his father would send him to a barrelhouse—a tavern where beer barrels served as a bar—with a pail to bring back a special holiday brew. Everybody at the tavern knew his father. There were local prize fights back then, one tavern’s champ against another’s, and his father, whose name was Michael, fought every Friday night. He fought as the Wild Goral, which sounded like an abbreviation for “gorilla,” but meant the wild man from the Tatra mountains—although, my father added cryptically, Mike might have been half Jewish and no hillbilly at all. He told me how once his father came home late with his front teeth broken and how he sat groaning, slugging from a fifth of whiskey and spitting blood into the beer pail as he worked at his teeth with a pair of pliers, trying to pull the stubs out of his bloody gums so he wouldn’t have to pay a dentist. Finally, he tried to get my father to yank out what was left of his teeth, and when my father wouldn’t, Mike got furious and chased him, trying to brain him with the whiskey bottle until he escaped by running out of the house.

Long past midnight on one of those Friday nights, drunken men brought the Goral home, half-conscious, blood running from his nose, mouth, and ears, his paycheck gone. He lay moaning in bed for a day, then slept for two more, and when he regained consciousness he was dazed, speechless, nearly helpless, and finally, after weeks that way he was taken to Dunning, the state mental hospital, a Palookaville from which he never returned.

My grandmother Victoria barely spoke English. She worked at home as a seamstress during the day. After they took Mike away, she got a second job at night scrubbing floors in a downtown office building. My father was eleven at the time, the oldest of the six kids, so as the man in the family, he had to work several jobs. He rose at five a.m. to deliver milk, then delivered newspapers, then attended grade school, and immediately after school he headed for the flower shop on Coulter Street, where he worked until suppertime. The shop was closing late on the Christmas Eve of the first year of Mike’s incarceration when the florist told my father there was a rush order on a wreath—not a Christmas wreath but a funeral wreath. They made it from pine boughs anyway, stuffed with wet sphagnum moss and tied with a black ribbon; my father helped work on it and the florist sent him to deliver it. The address was in a neighborhood my father wasn’t familiar with. He went through the city in the dark, half lost on the snow-drifted streets, holding the wreath out before him. He didn’t have gloves, and when he finally found the address, on a street that has since been erased by an expressway, he couldn’t knock because his hands were frozen to the wreath. He had to kick at the door.

A boy his own age answered, the son of the man who had died. The family couldn’t afford a funeral home so the body, dressed in a Sunday suit, was laid out in a small living room, or parlor, as my father called it—he always referred to living rooms as parlors. When the kid who answered the door saw that my father couldn’t let go of the wreath, he invited him in and sat him down beside the oil stove. There was a pan of water on top of the stove, and the kid, Teddy Kanik, brought a washcloth and towel and bathed my father’s hands until they thawed. He made him a cup of tea. They were best friends from that day on.

It’s a story I heard my father tell twice: once that evening as we strung the Bubble Lites on the Scotch pine, and then again, thirty years later, after he’d retired from his job at the foundry. He’d retired in Memphis, Tennessee, where he’d been transferred when the Harvester plant closed in Chicago. I was visiting after he’d had a stay in the hospital for the kidney ailment that would ultimately take his life. We were telling stories, laughing about all the crazy people from the old neighborhood, and I tried to get him to tell what he remembered about Poland. He was very young when, to use his phrase, “they came over on the boat.” Instead, he told the story about his father again, and when he reached the part about kicking at Teddy Kanik’s door, hands frozen to the funeral wreath, unable to knock, he broke into tears, something I’d never seen him do, excused himself, and rushed from the room.

At my father’s funeral, when there might have been an opportunity to pay a few words of respect, that story set in the dead of winter returned to my mind. It was summer in Memphis—“a scorcher,” my father would have called it—and his story seemed even more foreign there. Not the actual feeling itself, but the recollection of an old feeling from childhood, one for which I still don’t have a name, returned: an inexpressible protectiveness toward my father, a concern that, despite his faith in hard work and practicality, he’d never wholly appraised the reality of the country we lived in. We shared a home, we shared a life, but there was a dimension separating us. He inhabited another America, a distant place like Dickens’s London or Goigol’s Moscow. He feared that we, his sons, would go wanting, and that fear had set him at odds with us. I thought of telling his Teddy Kanik story at the wake but wasn’t sure what the point might be; the story wasn’t a way he’d want to be remembered in public, or a way of saying goodbye. And yet the story itself diminished anything else I could think of to say, and so, to my shame, I left my father unprotected and sat silently and listened to the priest mouth the usual clichés.

Mick had flown in from New York for the funeral toting a huge, bulging soft-sided plaid suitcase. Before his flight, he’d rushed to the Lower East Side to buy containers of pierogi and borscht, jars of herring, garlic dills, horseradish, kraut, links of fresh and smoked kielbasa—sausages my father loved and wasn’t able to eat in his last years because of his restricted diet. Mick knew that after the funeral a meal would be required. He stuffed in a bottle of wisniowka—a cherry brandy—and a bottle of 150 proof Demerara rum, then, at LaGuardia, checked the suitcase through to Memphis. Everything but the wisniowka and rum arrived broken and run together.

The rum was for Mick’s private tribute. He’d worked as a bouncer at a strip club on Forty-second Street and lived with one of the dancers, a striking Puerto Rican woman who’d introduced Mick to Santeria. He’d become an initiate and wanted to become a santero. He wore his caracoles—a shell necklace no one was allowed to touch—and brought a thick black candle inscribed with esoteric symbols that he erected before our father’s tomato patch as if we had buried him in the back yard. It was an offering made to Oya, patron of whirlwinds and cemeteries, to ease the entrance to the world of the dead. Oya’s syncretic form, he explained, to ease our mother’s misgivings, was Our Lady of Montserrat. Beside the candle, he set a shot of rum; Oya, fiercest of the female orishas, liked her drink strong. In the humid, bug-roaring darkness of Memphis, the orange candle flame flickered eerily off the tomato netting until Moms went out and drenched it with a blast from the garden hose.

The rum that Oya didn’t require Mick and I killed driving around at night between barbecue places and country bars in my father’s gold Chrysler. We ended up in a pool hall. My father had been a skilled pool player. Neither Mick nor I had inherited the gene. Maybe it was the similarity of our inept play, but people kept asking if we were twins. No, we told them, just brothers.

After the funeral we served a meal of Memphis barbecue and Lower East Side Polish sausage to my father’s surviving brother and three of his sisters, who’d all traveled from Chicago. We said a brief prayer and downed a wisniowka in a silent toast to my father’s memory.

I sat beside my aunt Olga, my father’s youngest sister.

“When we were kids, your father kept us all going,” she told me. “One year, when we barely had enough to eat, he somehow managed to show up with a tree on Christmas Eve, because, he said, our family shouldn’t be without one. He was a good brother. He was a good guy.”

“He never told me about that,” I said.

She dabbed her eyes. “There’s a lot he didn’t talk about.”

That was the first of times to come when missing my father took the shape of being startled that he was no longer there to answer a question regarding a past I knew so little about, to which he’d been my only link. I wished, with an intensity that ambushed me, that I could have asked him for the details on how he’d come up with the tree. It sounded like another story that might have made Charles Dickens proud.

 

When, in her composition, Camille Estrada told how she’d seen Charles Dickens standing on Washtenaw, I too saw him, a familiar face among the crowd watching Tito Guízar ride by. Camille might have argued that if Tito Guizar could actually appear parading through Little Village behind the miraculous Virgin, then why not Charles Dickens? The appearance of the Mexican cowboy star, complete with stallion, sombrero, a guitar strapped across his back, was barely less remarkable than that of an old British writer would have been. Dickens was the man in a starched collar with a blue cravat that matched his worn, serious eyes; his auburn hair was thinning, his flowing beard was the kind one saw on hoboes who lived by the railroad tracks. That was how Dickens was pictured on the card in Authors, a game our family played. Dickens shared the deck with Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Longfellow, Tennyson, Louisa May Alcott, Twain, Poe, Hawthorne. At bedtime, our mother would read from those authors to Mick and me.

“No wild stuff,” she’d caution, “this is reading time.”

It was the closest thing Mick and I had to sacred time.

On the Dickens card, beneath his likeness, four books were listed: Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol. Of those, Moms read Oliver Twist. We owned a set of 78 rpm records of a dramatized reading of A Christmas Carol starring Basil Rathbone, who was also Sherlock Holmes. My father had gotten a good deal on it at Maxwell Street.

Camille had tried to summon up the authority of Dickens’s fiction to justify the true story of Ralphie she wanted to tell, a story destined to end with the hopelessly pathetic fact of a boy dying on Christmas Eve. On some level she must have asked herself, who would read A Christmas Carol a second time if Tiny Tim died at the end? She needed a rebirth, a resurrection. A year had passed without a single miracle. Although parishioners had prayed for the Blue Boy so long that it had become a habit, they were bound to give up praying to him. It would occur to them, as it had to me the one shameful time I prayed to Ralphie and asked him to help me make the basketball team, that if Ralphie’s wish to make his First Holy Communion hadn’t been granted, why would he have the clout to intercede for anyone else? Gradually, but sooner than had ever seemed possible, he would be forgotten.

Camille needed to summon the timeless power of Dickens’s story in order to superimpose what remained of Ralphie’s spirit on the streets of Little Village. Her borrowing of images from Dickens wasn’t so different from the local spray-can artists who painted murals on the crumbling walls, as if Diego Rivera—like visions might shore up what urban renewal had not. There was a permanence to Dickens’s story that Camille aspired to. And in that, her tribute was not unlike the tributes of the gang bangers who sometimes tattooed an indelible blue tear at the outside corner of one eye in memory of a wasted homey. That was what Tony Bizzaro did after his brother, Peanuts, died.

It’s about feeling, Camille had told me that one afternoon when we were Partners in Christ.

She refused to settle for a tribute that took the shape of silence. She failed for want of accuracy, but not of feeling. Not for want of amor.

I don’t know what became of Camille Estrada. After Christmas break that year in eighth grade, a rumor spread that beneath the blue cardigan buttoned to the top no matter what the weather, Camille was wearing falsies. Sister Lucy didn’t inquire about the matter directly. Instead, she asked Camille not to wear the sweater during class, it wasn’t part of the school uniform. Camille correctly observed that by eighth grade the uniform code wasn’t strictly enforced, and besides, she was cold. So Sister Lucy offered to move her to a desk beside the radiators. Camille thanked her politely and said that wouldn’t be necessary, in the future she would leave her sweater at home.

But the following day, Camille still wore the blue sweater. After morning prayer, Sister Lucy reminded Camille that she’d promised to leave her sweater at home and asked her to hang it in the wardrobe—immediately. Camille remained seated, composed, silent, defiant. Sister Lucy observed that such behavior was hardly what she expected from the class valedictorian. The class went quiet. There’d never been a hint of confrontation between Camille and any of the nuns before.

“I want you to remove your sweater now,” Sister said, taking a step down the aisle toward Camille.

Camille replied softly in Spanish.

“What did you just say?” Sister Lucy demanded. The previously inconceivable possibility that Camille might have just cursed her stopped her in her tracks.

I, too, wondered if Camille had cursed. But later, Angel told me what she’d said was a proverb he’d heard his abuela use: “El hábito no hace al monje.” The habit doesn’t make the monk.

Camille didn’t repeat the words. Almost wearily, she began unbuttoning her sweater, but Sister Lucy stopped her.

“Camille, I want to speak with you in private. Please go to the principal’s office and wait there for me.”

This time, Camille complied immediately. As she rose and left class without another word, the half-unbuttoned sweater gave us a flash of a bosom worthy of Marilyn Monroe. It didn’t look natural on her, but I remember thinking, What if those aren’t falsies Camille was concealing?

“BB zizboombah!” Norky saluted, and Camille’s lips retracted in what may have passed for a smile.

Afterward, we learned that, instead of the principal’s office, Camille had gone to our small school library, where a senile nun named Sister Angelica presided over the books. Camille didn’t demand her old illustrated novels back. She checked them out on library cards and left, never to return. That was the last time I saw her, but hardly the last time I thought about her.

By junior year in high school, my earlier fascination with stories from Greek mythology evolved into an addiction to science fiction. I’d read on the bus to and from school, and sometimes late into the night, and each Saturday I’d stop for a new fix of sci-fi at the Gad’s Hill Library, which had also been my father’s neighborhood library. Sometimes, I’d imagine him going there when he was my age. He’d told me that as a kid he’d read every Hardy Boys mystery on the shelves but that, after reading a biography of Andrew Carnegie, he realized reading novels was impractical, a way for daydreamers to waste time. I decided to read every book in the science fiction section.

One sleeting, gray afternoon, sitting at a window table in Gad’s Hill, reading Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, I came upon a story called “The Man,” about earth voyagers to a distant planet who just miss Christ’s appearance there. The captain vows to keep questing after the Man until he finds him. “I’ll go on to another world,” he says. “And another and another. I’ll miss him by half a day on the next planet, maybe, and a quarter of a day on the third planet, and two hours on the next, and an hour on the next, and a minute on the next. But after that, one day I’ll catch up with him!”

There were no hooved Centaurians, but the idea of following Christ from world to world was so reminiscent of Camille’s story that I couldn’t help wondering if she’d stolen it. Or if, by seventh grade, her imagination was already the equal of Bradbury’s. I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she’d done penance for stories—stories that I’ll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She’d wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from dreams I hadn’t had as yet, and so I didn’t quite understand what she was after.

“It’s about feeling,” Camille had insisted.

I didn’t understand then that she was talking about risk.

 

There’s a recurrent dream that visits me less and less frequently. I first had it after my father took ill. In the dream, I’m pulling the red sled, but not loaded with a Christmas tree. What I’m hauling is an automobile battery, just as we actually did once in winter when my father’s Plymouth died at the factory lot. Rather than spend money to have a wrecker come out and jump it, he unbolted the Atlas battery and caught a ride home with a fellow employee. He left the battery at a gas station to be recharged, and after supper we walked to the gas station with the sled. The grease monkey—as my father called mechanics—said he couldn’t guarantee the battery would hold a charge, and in this subzero weather the safest thing was to buy a new one. My father didn’t even bother to ask what he soaked for it.

The old sled creaked when my father set the battery on it. He cautioned that we had to be very careful not to tip out the battery acid and told me to center the battery on the sled. I couldn’t even budge it.

“You practice lifting that, sonnyboy, and you’ll become Charles Atlas.” He laughed. “Nobody will kick sand in your face.” Then he repositioned it and we began the long trek back to the factory lot.

A curfew of cold had emptied the streets. It was probably approaching my bedtime—unusual for my father to have kept me out late, but that was how it happened, as if something important was going on. We crossed Rockwell, a border between blocks of apartment buildings and blocks of factories. Past Rockwell, the total absence of trees gave the industrial-strength streetlights a bluish glare that made the temperature seem to drop another few degrees. Even in summer the cracked, fissured sidewalks could be treacherous, as if a localized quake had occurred along these miles of truck docks, warehouses, and abandoned factories. Snow piled up unshoveled all winter. We took turns tugging the sled through the drifts and over mounds of dirty ice, one of us pulling, the other steadying the battery. I secretly wouldn’t have minded the sled tipping, as it repeatedly threatened to, because I wanted to see the reaction between battery acid and snow. Wind bored to marrow, and my feet in rubber galoshes and fingers in rabbit-furlined gloves went achingly numb. My face felt raw and chapped from the woolen scarf I’d raised like a mask, and I began worrying that the battery would be dead when we got to the car, that the engine wouldn’t turn over, and that we’d have to lug the battery all the way back to the gas station. I don’t remember a word of what we said as we walked, if we said anything at all, and yet there wasn’t a time when I felt closer to my father.

In the dream, I’m tugging the sled alone, and, without my father along, the effort seems increasingly senseless. Knee-deep in drifts, navigating mounded ice, I glance back to make sure the load hasn’t tipped, and in the squint of streetlights realize that it’s my father, blue with cold and reduced to an ancient child the compressed weight of a battery, which I’m pulling.

Who knows why certain humble objects—a bike, a sweater, a sled—are salvaged by memory or dream to become emblems of childhood? Childhood, an alternative universe expanding into forgetfulness, where memory rather than matter is the stuff of creation.

At the end of each day at St. Roman, classes would be released in order of seniority, so Chester would have to wait for Ralphie’s class to let out. He’d wait for Ralphie on the corner by the church. If it was raining, he’d have an umbrella already opened. Chester was the only boy at school with something as sissyish as an umbrella. At least it was a black umbrella. Then, he and his brother, Ralphie, walked home down Washtenaw together, engaged in their secret conversations.

Once, the spring after Ralphie died, I was released early from detention because the April afternoon was darkened by the total eclipse of a thunderstorm. The corridors were empty, all the classes had already fled home. Outside, I noticed from a half block away that Chester stood on the corner waiting with an open umbrella. He must have stayed to watch the younger kids file out. And he was still there waiting after they’d gone. Although I saw Chester in school every day, I really hadn’t talked to him since Ralphie died. We’d paid our condolences as a class, but I’d been feeling vaguely guilty around Chester for not having said something on my own, though of course there seemed nothing to say. It was raining hard enough that when I held my history book over my head I could feel as well as hear the drumming rain. I didn’t realize until I walked past him that Chester was crying. Maybe he thought no one would notice in the rain. Or maybe he didn’t realize it himself, as he made no attempt to conceal his tears.

“You’re getting soaked,” he said and gave the umbrella a little lift meaning that he’d share it.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I got my book, but thanks.”

“All right,” he said and gave me the thumbs-up sign that probably he’d taught to Ralphie.

I gave it back. And for no good reason, as I walked away, I felt forgiven for having prayed that one time to Ralphie as if death had turned him into something other than himself.

How many others back then pretended to pray when what they were doing was crying in secret—in secret even from themselves? Or praying as an alternative to futile tears? Or perhaps, praying because they thought they should have cried or should continue to cry for what they’d forgotten or would forget. Praying because one grief connects with another, and feeling insists upon being expressed, even if only in secret as prayer. A prayer for the brother of whom one might have been a better keeper; a prayer for the father one might have loved more gently; a prayer prayed the way children do, as if making a wish, as if hot tears are streaking a wild, cold heart; a prayer for all of God’s blue boys.